NetSuite for LIMS/Quality Testing Database

Hi all,

Have any of you used NetSuite for laboratory testing and records? Pros and Cons?

I sure know there are better systems out there, however we are a really tiny corporate laboratory and our company is already using NetSuite for a number of different items outside of QA. We are getting quotes from other LIMS/systems for anywhere from $35,000 - $250,000 with additional monthly service packages, all depending on the complexity. We really need something simple - excel type storage that is more secure and time stamped, with some really basic dashboards, capability reports, and general reporting as well as spec management. We are a super small corporate laboratory monitoring product from our co-packers as a secondary verification, and it'll be hard for me to justify an expense for a data management system that would cost more than our whole lab build out. Our current paper and excel methods have me pretty worried from a risk / loss standpoint.

I've found a little bit of info on their website, but I'd love to hear input from anyone with NetSuite experience in this manner, particularly some screen shots if you wouldn't mind sharing, before I call our rep (because it's an additional charge just to talk with them about implementation!$!)

Thank you

Before dropping the dollars on a system, if you don't have a huge sample volume and/or an ISO data management standard, you could instead purchase a couple MS access licenses and take a class on how to build databases in MS access? The learning curve/data management of a boxed system is going to be pretty much the same time committment in exchange for a fancier UI.

Hi there... I know this is a few years late but wanted to know what solution you found. You can also create a custom application within NetSuite to do this if your requirement isn't too complex. 

I am curious to know. thanks. 

We ended up going with QuickBase. I believe it's around $6K a year, so very reasonable in comparison to the others. It's simple, easy to build out apps for data collection, forms, reports, export the reports, our IT likes their data storage and server securities, and we can even have notifications sent to managers via email for out of spec tests. I just saw the suggestion on here for MS access - we did look into access a few years ago, but just didn't have anyone on the team with that kind of time to learn and build from scratch. We also really didnt like the NetSuite options, although we use that across our business for everything else. QuickBase has a build yourself option, which is still very simple and has templates you can use, or work with engineers. We used the free engineer time to do the hard stuff and took the online trainings to learn everything else we needed. Super simple and working out great for us still years later. Hope that helps!