A count is only a count if the chain behind it holds.
Microbiology is the discipline where the paperwork is the result. ErgoLIMS holds the holding time, the incubation window, the media lot, the analyst's authorisation and the environmental record against every plate you read.
Plates and colonies — drawn live in the browser, no two frames alike
Everything that invalidates a micro result happens before the plate is read
The sample sat at ambient for five hours. The media lot was never growth-promoted. The incubator drifted overnight and nobody logged it. The analyst reading the plate was signed off for enumeration, not for pathogen confirmation. None of that appears on the report — and all of it is what an assessor asks about.
Six things a microbiology lab gets that a spreadsheet cannot give it
Each of these is a shipped capability, not a roadmap item.
Holding time is captured at the door
Date of collection, time of collection and temperature at receipt are structured registration fields on every microbiology sample — not a note in a remarks box. The clock that decides whether a result is reportable starts on the record itself.
Only a cleared analyst can report the organism
Per-method authorisations carry a competency level and an expiry date. If an analyst's sign-off for Salmonella confirmation has lapsed, result entry refuses the save with ANALYST_NOT_AUTHORIZED — on the server, not as a warning the browser can skip.
An out-of-calibration incubator cannot report
Incubators, autoclaves, air samplers and biosafety cabinets sit in the instrument register with calibration and preventive-maintenance schedules. The day a calibration lapses the instrument locks out and any result claiming it is refused.
Absent/present is evaluated, not typed
Pathogen methods are configured as text-result tests with their limit expressed the way the standard writes it — 'Absent in 25 g', 'Shall not be detectable in any 100 mL sample'. A detection is flagged on entry and opens an out-of-specification investigation before anyone drafts a certificate.
Media and reagents trace to the plate
Prepared media, reference strains and reagents are inventory items with expiry tracking and first-expired-first-out issue. Consumption is recorded against the test that used it, so a growth-promotion failure can be traced to every result the lot touched.
Environmental monitoring runs on the same spine
Settle plates, active air, surface contact and personnel monitoring are seeded as methods with EU GMP Annex 1 and ISO 14698 limits, so cleanroom data lives in the same system, on the same audit trail, as the product it protects.
How a microbiology sample moves through the system
The registration form — three steps, with the customer-committed date and the internal lab target kept as separate fields.
Three people in the lab, three different wins
The system tells you before you start whether you are cleared for this method and whether the incubator is in date — instead of a reviewer telling you a week later.
Media QC, environmental monitoring, competency expiry and OOS investigations are one query, not five folders.
Every count on a released certificate traces to an authorised analyst, a calibrated incubator and a growth-promoted media lot.
Compliance a microbiology assessor will recognise
ISO/IEC 17025 §6.2 — personnel
Skills register, per-method authorisation with expiry, training records and certifications, enforced at result entry rather than filed for the assessor.
IP 2022 / USP <61>, <62>, <71>, <85>
Non-sterile enumeration, specified organisms, sterility and bacterial endotoxin seeded as methods with their published acceptance criteria.
EU GMP Annex 1 · ISO 14698
Settle plate, active air, surface and personnel monitoring with grade-based alert limits available as standard methods.
21 CFR Part 11
Electronic signatures with identity challenge and reason capture; the audit trail is append-only and enforced by database triggers, not by the interface.
And you do not start from an empty system
Choose the microbiology domain at setup and ErgoLIMS provisions the scaffolding for you — as editable templates, not a locked configuration. Limits shown arrive pre-loaded for the domain. They are editable, versioned and can be overridden per customer or per product.
Questions we hear from microbiology labs
See it run on your own parameters
A 30-minute walkthrough with the engineers who built it — using your methods, your limits and your reporting format, not a canned script.