Most probably, someone in your lab said one of these in the last 6 months:
We surveyed 110 QA/QC labs, and turns out, they all have the same 5 excuses. Almost always, they cost labs more than they imagine.
Let’s see if any of these 5 excuses are used in your lab.
1 in 3 labs still crunch numbers in Excel by hand. For one QC technician, that adds up to roughly 370 hours a year, nearly a full workday every week. At about 35€ an hour, that's around 13,000€ a year per person.
And this person keying data still gets around 1% wrong on a good day. One wrong result is a rerun (or worse, a recall), which averages roughly €8.6M in direct costs alone. A new hire can't solve that risk, but a traceable, audit-ready system can.
Verdict: one more person costs as much as automation but introduces errors.
Budget is the safest "no," but it's rarely the real reason. When 110 labs named what blocks them, the budget came last at 7%. The true blockers to automation are:
"No budget" also assumes your current setup is free. It isn't because Excel just bills you in reruns and lost afternoons instead of sending an invoice.
Verdict: it's rarely about the money.
This one's real: staff resistance is the #2 barrier in our survey (21%). But that's a reason to roll out differently instead of waiting. Teams come around when the new way is easier than the old one.
That's what happened at Micarna: a big, established lab whose technicians had worked the same way for years moved to 1LIMS in 4 months, and even staff that was only somewhat comfortable with computers use 1LIMS with ease.
Verdict: teams don't hate tools that make their job easier.
85% of the labs we surveyed run 16+ staff, and 2 in 3 process 200+ samples a day. At that volume, doing data by hand doesn't get easier with time. Every year you wait is another year of legacy files and shadow spreadsheets to untangle later.
Zweifel, the Swiss chips brand producing 25,000 tons of potatoes a year is as established as they come. It moved off paper and Excel onto 1LIMS and now loses zero samples:
Verdict: waiting doesn't make the switch easier, but more expensive.
Owning a LIMS and running a connected lab are two different things. 83% of labs have a LIMS, but only 11% have their instruments and software connected, and a third of LIMS users still open Excel every day to fill the gaps.
If a result gets copy-pasted from instrument to spreadsheet to LIMS, your lab is not digital yet.
Verdict: most labs are living in the gap between having a LIMS and being fully digital.
You're not behind. 74% of the labs we surveyed call themselves "hybrid" or "mostly digital," stuck in the same in-between.
But the truth is, you can't fix processes that you haven’t measured.
That's the whole point of a LabCheck: a structured audit that maps how your samples move, spots the automation wins, and shows ROI before you spend on new software.
When we ran one for Frifag Märwil AG, it projected 22% less time on quality data management and about CHF 15,400 saved a year. Suddenly the budget debate was over.
P.S. Want to dive deeper? Check these out:
👉 Full report, 110 labs surveyed: 2026 State of Lab Digitalization
👉 The honest math on your lab's "free" tool: Excel is the most expensive free thing in your lab
👉 Think you don't have time to map your process? You don't have time not to — one lab was losing 49 hours a week to data they'd never mapped: "But we don't have time to map the process"
Happy & safe lab work!
❤️ Greetings,
1LIMS Team
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