ZURICH, SWITZERLAND, May 22, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — 1LIMS publishes the 2026 State of Lab Digitalization report, based on a survey of 110 QA/QC laboratories and interviews with lab industry experts.
The Swiss-based LIMS provider set out to measure how far along analytical labs are. The report found that 95% already use digital tools, yet only 1 in 5 consider themselves fully digital.
54% of labs still use Excel for day-to-day work. Among those that already have a LIMS, a third use it alongside. While no longer the main system, Excel has become the lab’s key tool. Reporting, instrument data transfer, sample registration, the tasks labs haven’t automated yet are exactly the ones it gets pulled in to cover.
When asked what prevents them from automating further, analytical labs ranked budget last, cited by just 7% of respondents. What actually stops them is regulatory constraints (22%), staff resistance (21%), and difficulty integrating systems (20%).
The tools are there, but the data doesn’t flow. “Every analytical lab we work with has invested money and time in something: a LIMS, spreadsheets, ELN, instrument software,” says Philipp Osterwalder, founder of 1LIMS. “But this alone doesn’t make an analytical lab digital. What does is when the data flows without someone manually carrying it. That’s the gap we keep seeing, and that’s what this research set out to measure.”
1LIMS ran the survey between November 2025 and March 2026. Five lab industry practitioners contributed interviews. Read the full report here.
About 1LIMS
1LIMS was founded in Zurich in 2016 by Philipp Osterwalder, a lab scientist who moved from pharma into food manufacturing and found quality teams still running on paper, Excel, and disconnected spreadsheets. Today, 1LIMS helps manufacturing and service labs in the food and beverage industry get their lab data organized.
Philipp Osterwalder
1LIMS
philipp.osterwalder@1lims.com
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