Agilent announces an expansion of its Enterprise Edition qualification programme, which enables customers in highly regulated environments to use a single protocol to meet compliance requirements
Effective immediately, this automated, paperless programme is now compatible with gas chromatography (GC) and liquid chromatography (LC) mass spectrometers (MS).
"In the pharmaceutical, food safety and other high-regulated fields around the world, Enterprise Edition is playing an increasingly important role in reducing the costs of lab compliance," said Agilent's David Heiger, worldwide services marketing manager.
"Since its introduction early last year, Enterprise Edition has quickly grown to become the leading comprehensive qualification service for chromatography instruments, and we're now proud to expand its availability into the gas chromatography and mass spectrometry arena".
Typically, the highest cost for instrument compliance is review and approval of protocols and reports, a cost that rises yet further in labs using instrumentation from multiple vendors where protocols and process vary widely from one another.
Enterprise Edition, the latest of several equipment-qualification solutions within the Agilent Compliance Services Portfolio, dramatically decreases this cost by streamlining compliance procedures across an entire company.
Combined with electronic reporting and approval, Enterprise Edition has successfully reduced the overall qualification down-time of instruments by 50 percent or more.
Enterprise Edition also leads to savings on many other lab compliance costs, including the labor needed for instrument testing, administration of service providers, development and maintenance of corporate protocols, instrument downtime, inefficiencies caused by lack of enterprise-wide consistency, and time-consuming records maintenance and sharing As Agilent's Paul Coombes, worldwide compliance services programme manager, puts it, "Typically, labs are filled with different LC, GC, LC/MS and GC/MS models and manufacturers, each with its own equipment qualification protocols.
"Managers are forced to deal with multiple compliance vendors, and technicians spend valuable time completing handwritten reports - and still the company can be at risk during regulatory audits.
"As a single qualification protocol, Enterprise Edition helps customers avoid these pitfalls while saving valuable time and money".
With today's expansion, Enterprise Edition is applicable to the two new Agilent products being launched this wek at Pittcon 2007: the Agilent 7890A GC, featuring a wide range of industry-leading GC innovations built on Agilent's legendary reliability, and the Agilent 5975C GC/MS, which leverages the benefits of the new GC to unprecedented sensitivity in a GC/MS.
