I believe it is possible to delight customers in the laboratory marketplace. Toward that end, we will be offering them a range of products and services that will respond specifically to their needs. Rick Kniss, Senior Vice President & General Manager Chemical Analysis Group Agilent Technologies

And you thought we were just the same old company with a new name, right?

No indeed. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that the Agilent's Chemical Analysis Group is a billion-dollar enterprise with a commanding lead in several areas, this Group is effectively part of a new company taking a new approach to its markets.

This new approach can be summed up in a short phrase: serve the customer better. Better than the old company, and better than our competitors.

We'll be providing our first demonstration of this approach at the Pittsburgh Conference in New Orleans from March 13th through 16th. Both on their own merits and as harbingers of things to come, these developments deserve a close look.

In the past, CAG was organized along product lines — gas chromatographs, liquid chromatographs, detectors, and so forth. Today, as a reflection of our new emphasis on the customer, CAG has reorganized along customer or solution lines: business units are now dedicated to bio/pharma, petroleum/petro-chemical/chemical/ environmental, software/services, and consumables/accessories.

Says vice president of sales & marketing Chris van Ingen, "Solution selling at Agilent focuses on people, processes and technology. To be successful, the solution must decrease the cost or improve the yield of a process in the customer's operation."

Here with some new, customer-focused, Agilent-at-Pittcon solutions:

Virtual Highlight
One of the most telling innovations we'll have on display at Pittcon will be a couple of plain vanilla computers with flat-panel displays. Nothing else special about them — except that they will be connected to Agilent's new e-commerce Shopping Village at www.agilent.com/chem . Conference-goers will be able to order their supplies and accessories directly from the show floor.

And, (drum roll, please) until March 31st, folks, as a special introductory incentive to those who don't already have special VEU or GSA pricing, there's a 10% discount on all items ordered directly from this site.

"We can do more than just show pictures of our products at our Web site," Tim Spaeder, E-Business Programs Manager, says of the new Web site. "Agilent customers can now track their own orders from our plant to their plant. Select customers will be able to tap into our inventory directly and see what we have in stock, get projected delivery times as well as investigate order history — all without human intervention. In addition, the customer will get a lot of tech support information off the Web that they'd ordinarily have to call an application chemist for."

Eventually, Agilent expects to sell completely configured instruments from this site, to people who already know precisely what they want. In which case, no salesman will call. A list of refurbished inventory is also available.

QA/QC PDQ
Agilent took a close look at the way QA/QC is done in the hydocarbon processing production environment and proceeded to design GC software that would reflect the user's world instead of the instrument designer's universe.

The result is called Agilent Cerity networked data system for chemical QA/QC, the first software application in the Cerity family that renders chemical QA/QC tasks bulletproof and bullet-quick. "We call the user interface 'sample-centric'," says product manager Jon Welsh. "An operator, interacting with a single screen, enters the sample name, which automatically selects the method and instrument for them. The software is very simple; you cannot get lost in it. And when you combine the Cerity chemical QA/QC application with the 6850 GC — which itself is specifically designed as a rugged, easy-to-use instrument for the production environment — you get the ideal system for routine analyses in labs where strict adherence to GLP and cGMP is not an issue"

Cross-industry Applicability
Another way to enhance Agilent's 6850 or 6890 GCs is with the new Agilent 5973Network Mass Selective Detector.

In keeping with our intensified customer focus, this tool improves operator effectiveness, provides LAN-based communication between instrument and data system, and offers an unprecedented ability to adapt to a laboratory's established work practices. The MSD Productivity ChemStation software can now control multiple GCs and MSDs from a single PC. The 5973Network has proven invaluable in industries as diverse as environmental testing, testing for drugs of abuse, forensics, and chemical and petro-chemical production.

ICP-MS Anyone?
Never one to stand still, Agilent Technologies has just introduced three new inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) instruments to replace the very successful Agilent 4500 Series. The new Agilent 7500 Series has been tailored to address the specific needs of some important markets.

The first of these consists of the general purpose workhorse, the 7500a, plus two new application packages: the 7500i and the 7500s. The 7500i is designed for very high sample throughput to meet the demands of busy contract analysis facilities, while the 7500s delivers the sensitivity required to support the development of next-generation semiconductor devices.

Value Chain Links
Agilent's Chemical Analysis Group is making every effort to align itself both internally and externally with the bio/pharma industry value chain. From our work with the pharmaceutical industry, that chain looks like this:

We are linking into that chain at every step along the way. A few examples:

Under disease discovery, we're showing the new Agilent 2100 bioanalyzer, based on our Lab-on-a-chip¨ collaboration with microfluidics developer Caliper Technologies. It's focused on nucleic acid analysis.

Across the spectrum of the value chain from disease discovery through drug development, we are introducing several new products. One is a new capillary HPLC system based on our highly regarded Agilent 1100 Liquid Chromatograph.

Complementing our capillary HPLC system is a well-plate auto sampler for 96 and 384 well plates. Cooled or uncooled. With injection rates approximately three times faster than standard LC, the much sought-after outcome of higher throughput analysis becomes a reality.

Another new development is the Agilent 1100 Series LC/MSD Trap, which offers the power and productivity of ion trap MS/MS and MSn in a true benchtop package. It integrates Agilent's patented orthogonal-spray ion source and Bruker Daltonik's patented multipole ion trap design into an easy-to-use instrument that yields exceptional LC/MS or CE/MS performance, sample after sample.

The LC/MSD Trap's complement, the Agilent 1100 Series LC/MSD, is a quadrupole mass spectrometer with news of its own. The new SL model features a 10x sensitivity improvement over its predecessor.

In manufacturing, another member of the Cerity family of networked data systems provides an ideal solution for pharma QC. Compared to its chemical complement, this QA/QC application was designed to follow the customary pharmaceutical QC work flow practices, it's scalable, and it comes with a full suite of regulatory compliance tools. In addition, we'll have our Agilent 8453 UV-Vis spectrophotometer on hand, the instrument of choice for dissolution analyses in QC.

All of which is by way of saying, Rick Kniss has set his sights on delighting you. We think our Pittcon display is a good beginning.

###

Visit us at Booth #6447