User:Shawndouglas/sandbox/sublevel10

With a few minor exceptions (e.g., Colorado's limitation that "a Medical Marijuana Testing Facility shall not perform testing on Industrial Hemp"), a laboratory licensed to analyze medical marijuana or recreational cannabis is most likely able to branch out to not only other types of cannabis testing but also testing within other markets. Consider the equipment most commonly used in cannabis analysis: chromatography, spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, and polymerase chain reaction systems. What other types of laboratory testing use that sort of equipment? Environmental science laboratories are definitely using such equipment, arguably representing one of the easier lateral market expansions a cannabis testing lab can take. Food and beverage analyses also depend on all those equipment types, as do other forms of testing such as agricultural testing, cosmetic testing, and petrochemical testing. Assuming a lab has or can acquire the in-house expertise for analyzing all these related matrices, analytes, and molecules, as well as the regulatory know-how (e.g., Environmental Protection Agency testing methodologies) and licensing, expanding into other markets beyond cannabis testing may be a realistic long-term proposition.

If your lab is realistically considering this sort of market expansion, it's in your lab's best interest to consider a LIMS that is flexible enough to allow for the expansion of its portfolio of tests, protocols, workflows, and other laboratory management tools beyond those required for cannabis testing. Yes, a quality LIMS built for cannabis testing will offer preloaded cannabis testing protocols, labels, and analytical reports, as well as the ability to add new and customize existing protocols, labels, and analytical reports as standard methods and regulatory requirements evolve. Such a LIMS will also provide flexible specification limit sets for quality control, third-party system integrations with reporting and business solutions, instrument interfacing for all those chromatography and mass spectrometry devices, granular chain-of-custody, real-time alerts, issue tracking, and workload monitoring, to name a few. But all that functionality has important cross-over to environmental, food and beverage, cosmetic, and petrochemical analyses as well, including the ability to add and modify tests, protocols, and workflows associated with those analyses within the LIMS.

This brings up another significant question to consider in cannabis testing LIMS acquisition: how flexible is your LIMS? How configurable is it? How customizable is it, despite some base similarities in requirements with other testing markets? Aspects of a LIMS lending to an expansion into other markets include:

• having the tools for creating and customizing sample registration screens for sample types beyond cannabis-related ones;
• having the tools for creating new, compliant test protocols, labels, and reports, as well as for managing them as industries change;
• offering sufficiently flexible protocol creation for adding most any specification limit sets, measurement units, substrates/matrices, etc.;
• being able to integrate with instruments and software systems beyond those common to cannabis testing labs, including handling most any API thrown at it; and
• having the functionality to help laboratories comply with the wide variety of standards and regulations found in other testing markets.

Even in 2021, as legalization efforts continue to march forward in the U.S. and standard methods continue to be developed, cannabis testing laboratories still face a number of challenges. Using automation tools like a LIMS is one way to overcome those challenges, particularly as the cannabis testing space gets more crowded, driving prices downward. However, you want to be sure the LIMS you choose is not only compatible with your budget but also able to tackle all your current and future testing needs, while helping you streamline processes and improve workflows. A sturdy LIMS capable of managing cannabis analyses while being flexible enough to allow your lab—whether you're an existing lab wanting to expand into other markets or a start-up lab eyeing broad horizons—to handle other analyses will be highly valuable in a time when the status of the fledgling cannabis industry continues to be in flux. In the end, no matter what type of lab you represent, your laboratory business model will be one to minimize risk while maximizing income. As such, diversifying into other markets with a flexible LIMS just makes sense.