Quality assurance aspects in biochemical and chemical information technology

Tools of information technology became inevitable parts of modern process and system documentation. The exact documentation is a principal problem of quality assurance systems (QAS), from the very beginning of the design to the final implementation and continuous operation of the system. Much of the data produced and recorded in a biochemical and especially in an agricultural QAS is disperse - if they are not directly fuzzy. One important feature in such a database is traceability of the history of the final product. A unique identifier by which for example the climate parameters, the plant protection data or another information can be retrieved from the records achieves this traceability. We have created several test applications running on different database systems (DBS). Through our investigation we have tried to use the simple tools of Microsoft Office, a referential DBS (Ms SQL Server) and GroupWare (Lotus Notes). We show results and examples from these multilevel problems of information technology focused on the special requirements of QA. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.