Robotics fulfil a strategic need

The authors' jobs in Shell involve responsibility for the analytical activity which includes about 220 people at the central research laboratory and roughly another 50 or so in quality control laboratories at various plants and refineries. Because it is a rapidly evolving technology, the chemists' arsenal of analytical methods continues to change (figure 2). Figure 2 represents the authors' experience at the research facility during the 1980s. It is clear that without continual modernization of methods and procedures, a large number of methods would be obsolete within a relatively short time. The rate ofchange is less marked for the quality assurance/quality control type activities, but even these are not exempt from change.