Over the last decade, many calibration facilities have automated all or parts of their facilities to help comply with quality standards and to collect consistent information and reduce paper flow. Laboratories would look at their internal processes and decide which parts of the lab to automate. Typically, only discrete parts of laboratories were automated. For example, the "inventory information" step of the new asset process would be automated using a single computer workstation and software was purchased for the asset inventory system. Then other software and workstations were used to automate the calibration functions. This automation effort often included the installation of local area networks and central file servers. These central systems allowed us to store our core programs and data in a common place, and make sure it was properly backed up. This type of environment resulted in a system shown in Figure 1. There are separate programs for asset management and for collecting calibration data. Each of these programs has its own database, and, in some cases, the same programs do not share data. Each program runs on the workstation and performs file reads and writes directly to the file server. The file server is only used as a remote hard disk. In 1986 this was a cutting edge system.
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