 Company: The Gwinnett County Department of Public Utilities
Water Resources Laboratory
Gwinnett, GA
Business Strategy:
The mission of the Gwinnett Department of Water Resources is to enhance quality of life by providing excellent water, wastewater, and stormwater services at the best possible value to our customers while preserving natural water resources.
Company Profile:
The Gwinnett County Department of Water Resources operates and maintains a central laboratory for analyzing water, wastewater, and environmental samples. On a daily basis, Gwinnett Water Resources Laboratory (WRL) conducts chemical analyses and biological testing to ensure regulatory compliance, such as the Clean Water Act (specifically, National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES)) and Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). The WRL staff includes analysts, field personnel (including the Industrial Pretreatment Program), management, and computer support for a total of 25 employees. The WRL processes approximately 20,000 samples and performs 57,000 analyses per year. The WRL is currently accredited by The American Association for Laboratory Accreditation (A2LA) to the requirements of ISO/IEC 17025, "General Requirements for the Competence of Testing and Calibration Laboratories". Many of these requirements are the same as those required by National Environmental Laboratory Accreditation Conference (NELAC).
Sample Master® Pro LIMS at the Gwinnett County Department of Public Utilities Water Resources Laboratory:
Prior to implementing Sample Master® Pro LIMS, the laboratory used a manual method of managing laboratory information. Raw data was maintained in paper logbooks or entered into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, and reports were often generated in Microsoft Word. While this method was sufficient when the laboratory was smaller, as the laboratory grew, managing information and trying to obtain trending data was proving to be increasingly time consuming, error prone and complex. Recording and extracting appropriate data for analysis and reporting was becoming difficult at best.
Additionally, given the laboratory’s experience with primarily manual processes and inexperience with mapping these processes into a LIMS, they requested ATL to conduct a Needs Assessment of the laboratory and configure the LIMS to the characteristics of the laboratory. The Needs Assessment recommendations provided by ATL streamlined the implementation of Sample Master® Pro LIMS and ensured that existing WRL processes were not only mapped into the LIMS, but also modified to ensure maximum efficiency gains. New processes were recommended and implemented for additional efficiency gains.
The laboratory now enjoys increased control of their samples, data management, data access, analysis and meeting regulatory requirements. This represents a significant improvement over the previous islands of information that were located in separate logbooks and Excel spreadsheets. With the ability to set permissions, automatically e-mail pdf reports, and integrate with other applications, the LIMS offers a centralized data repository from which final analysis reports can be generated and data exchanged with others in the organization. Significant savings in time and data quality have resulted in the installation and implementation of Sample Master® Pro LIMS.
“Prior to Sample Master® Pro LIMS, sample login and tracking were laborious and time consuming. Using Sample Master® Pro, we are able to create projects and use the scheduler to pre-log samples which has been a great time saving element. The query screen, which impressed our staff during the demo, has proven to be a very powerful and useful tool.”
Alan Serrero, Quality Systems Manager
Water Resources Laboratory of the Gwinnett County Department of Public Utilities
 Download PDF Version
|
