Laboratory management, problems

During this phase, little thought was directed to the wider problems which confront a laboratory which changes from a regime based on manual analysis to one dependent on automation. However, many laboratories now have several years of experience with automated systems, and it is possible to address the broader issues. Brief consideration is given here to the problems which the introduction of automated analysis pose for the analytical chemist and for the laboratory management. 

Chapter 1 provides a historical review of the evolutionary process, tracing the problems and concerns of regulators and the response of laboratory managers to those issues. The ultimate result, is the series of guidelines published as the GLPs, provided with a context and rationale. 

Most laboratory managers will have an intuitive sense of which problems need attention. Nevertheless, it is a good idea to solicit feedback from other members of the laboratory, if for no other reason than to give people at all levels in the organization a common understanding of what is needed. It is recommended to document this problem statement so that it will be clear in the future what the goal is. Note that at this point it is not necessarily an automation project it is only a problem statement. In the... 

J. Forrester, an electrical engineer, invented the random access magnetic core memory (RAM) now used in most digital computers. In 1945 he foimded the Digital Computer Laboratory at MIT and participated in die development of Whirlwind I, a general purpose digital computer. Forrester worked on the application of computers to management problems which led to computer simulation where real world problems represented by interconnected equations are solved by a computer. 

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