Harvard Graduate School of Chemistry has a variety of sophisticated mass spectrometry equipment. One room contains a half dozen instruments; all of different brands and of different ages. Each of these systems keeps its precious research data in a different proprietary format. Harvard faced the challenge of making all of this equipment available for multiple projects and to various departments. Each department and project needed to be billed for actual use of the instrument. And each department needed to know that their sensitive data was protected against system failures, and kept confidential. GCA developed a way to link the new, and the legacy machines into one secure network; and to make a common billing and archival mechanism. GCA’s automated billing and backup process does in 1/2 hour what used to take the better part of each week to accomplish.	Instrument Automation