Regrouping, reforming and re-engineering: applying robotics to new challenges.

Thispaper describes the effects of re-engineering, or businessprocess engineering, on the pharmaeutical industry. It then extrapolates the re-engineering fever to the field of analytical chemistry and shows that the use of automation will concomitantly increase over the next several years. This will require a fresh look at projects and situations that can be automated, as well as those thoughtpreviously non-automatable. The ability of laboratory personnel to ’think out of the box’ will dictate their rise or fall as successful analysts.