Portland, OR—Northwest Analytical, Inc. (NWA) announced today that its NWA Quality Analyst software is now available as an SPC add-in to ChemWare's HORIZON Laboratory Information Management System. The HORIZON LIMS provides a user-configurable, enterprise-wide solution by combining powerful report writing options and interfacing tools with the fully integrated NWA Quality Analyst add-in, called HORIZON Statistical Analysis^®.

Incorporating NWA Quality Analyst into HORIZON will provide its users with more advanced quality control charting, statistical and graphical analysis options. The LIMS user accesses Quality Analyst features directly from HORIZON's standard menus and windows, tailored to provide simple query transactions, filters and output format controls. With the addition of NWA Quality Analyst capabilities, HORIZON users can easily query and analyze data by instrument, analyst/technician, sample type or matrix, for example, then save the query criteria for recurring analyses over time. QC charts may be previewed on screen or printed en masse in a batch mode operation. With a few mouse-clicks, the user may analyze data for statistical outliers, generate new quality control limits, then update HORIZON's Control Limits tables. HORIZON maintains a continuous online history of control limits by setting "start" and "stop" dates during which each set of limits are in effect. The native HORIZON interface allows the user to build queries using virtually any combination of variables available in the database, selected from familiar terms in choice lists. Queries may even be filtered by client, sample location, collector or contract, reducing to a few seconds the time required to generate project-specific QC data and charts.

"This level of integration solves a critical problem for the typical LIMS user--," says Robert Whitehead, ChemWare's Vice President, "--and that is, to eliminate any need to use programmatic query languages, to understand LIMS data structures, or to know how to connect to the LIMS database. Many of our customers--from the commercial environmental lab to the hospital-based toxicology lab--are faced with managing large, complex datasets. Unlike the samples in a small process control lab, these tests can be associated with a wide variety of demographic data, not just sample ID and collection date and time. Our users might be assaying samples by dozens of test methods for hundreds of known and/or unknown analytical parameters. The fusion of NWA QA with HORIZON permits the non-programmer to quickly analyze multivariate QC data in both an off-line mode and as part of a real-time statistical process control system."

"We are pleased that ChemWare has incorporated our SQC capability into their LIMS. Such a partnering provides ChemWare users with a complete laboratory data management and quality reporting solution," says Jeffery Cawley, Northwest Analytical VP.

Northwest Analytical, Inc. is a software developer providing analytical software for understanding processes and improving quality in the production of goods and delivery of services. The NWA suite of quality management software includes NWA Quality Analyst, NWA Quality Monitor and NWA Quality Analyst Web Server. NWA's software has become a standard corporate solution for process and quality improvement due to its power, flexibility and ease of use.

ChemWare, headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina (USA), provides off-the-shelf LIMS solutions to the environmental, water quality, chemical demilitarization, chemical manufacturing, drugs-of-abuse, toxicology and related analytical testing industries. HORIZON is the LIMS of choice for five of the top twenty-five U.S. commercial environmental labs, the country's largest generator of electricity, over one in five NIDA-certified drug testing labs, the world's largest producer of transportation coatings, and one of the U.S. government's primary contractors in waste management and chemical site decommissioning. Designed for the highest level of integration and automation, its open, modular architecture also makes HORIZON well-suited for the smallest municipal water quality and clinical toxicology labs.

For further information:

Jeffery Cawley
Northwest Analytical, Inc.
(503) 224-7727
jcawley@nwasoft.com

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