Quality assurance aspects in biochemical and chemical information technology

Tools of information technology became inevitable parts of modern process a nd system documentation. The exact documentation is a principal problem of quality assurance systems (QAS), from the very beginning of the design to t he final implementation and continuous operation of the system. Much of the data produced and recorded in a biochemical and especially in an agricultu ral 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 pr otection data or another information can be retrieved from the records achi eves this traceability. We have created several test applications running o n different database systems (DBS). Through our investigation we have tried to use the simple tools of Microsoft Office, a referential DBS (Ms SQL Ser ver) and GroupWare (Lotus Notes). We show results and examples from these m ultilevel problems of information technology focused on the special require ments of QA. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.