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 Presiding as President and CEO of ELAB, Inc. is Henry N. “Hank” Ashby. With over 25 years of corporate governance experience in the environmental, electric utility and management consulting industries as well as having extensive experience helping many types of international organizations implement Total Quality Management (TQM), the President’s primary responsibility at ELAB, Inc. is to provide leadership, guidance and support for the company’s overall operations. His experience with FPL, the first company outside of Japan to win the Deming Prize, and it’s subsidiary, Qualtec Quality Services, has helped our company with implementation of an outstanding quality system that provides accurate and reliable data for our clients. Most importantly, it is the President’s responsibility to ensure that the laboratory’s staff strives to realize its vision: “to be valued by employees and recognized by clients as a leader in the environmental services industry”.
The company’s laboratory operations are led by Andre J. Rachmaninoff, the Laboratory Director and Vice President of Operations. With over twenty years of experience in an environmental laboratory setting from bench chemist and microbiologist to department manager, laboratory manager, project manager, and ultimately to his current position, the Laboratory Director serves as the overall guide for all technical and administrative processes within the laboratory. Although his primary responsibility rests in an oversight role, the Laboratory Director interacts closely with all Project Management staff, helping resolve regulatory and technical client issues, reviewing client contracts, interacting with regulatory agencies, and assisting with resource allocation for large or non-routine client projects. It is ultimately the Laboratory Director’s responsibility to make sure that the Project Management staff has all of the resources they need to meet the laboratory’s clients’ analytical testing needs
In addition to the technical support provided to the Project Management staff by the Laboratory Director is that provided by the laboratory’s Director of Quality, Lorraine Noronha. With over 15 years of experience in analytical chemistry , the Director of Quality provides the Project Management and technical staff at ELAB, Inc. with frequent updates regarding changes in environmental law or regulatory compliance processes that affect both the laboratory and its clients. She is available for client consultation on a wide variety of laboratory technical and regulatory topics, including laboratory quality control criteria, project analytical methodology applications, maximizing analytical effectiveness in an effort to minimize analytical costs, and assessing laboratory data quality, among others. Although available directly to ELAB, Inc.’s clients as a technical resource, she is more often employed by the Project Management staff to provide clients with presentations and brief seminars, either in the laboratory, or at client offices.
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The technical, managerial and client services staff at ELAB, Inc. is comprised largely of professional scientists with undergraduate and advanced degrees in a wide variety of disciplines, with an overall emphasis on organic and inorganic chemistry, and microbiology. With over 65 chemists, biologists, technicians, IT specialists and administrative support staff, ELAB, Inc. provides environmental analytical and field sampling services to a wide variety of clients, including state and local municipalities and utilities, federal EPA and DOD agencies, public and private industry, and many professional engineering, geotechnical and environmental consulting firms, and has been doing so for over 30 years.
 At the core of ELAB, Inc.’s staff are its Project Managers, who serve as the primary liaison between ELAB, Inc.’s clients and the resources available to them through the laboratory. With an average experience level of almost 15 years in environmental analysis, the Project Managers handle all aspects of each client’s analytical requirements, including pre-project planning, which includes analytical methodology and cost evaluation; sample kit coordination; project login and subsequent client technical requirement disbursement to the analytical staff; final report evaluation, which includes a quality control check and a final assessment of whether client regulatory and technical objectives have been met; project invoicing at client agreed-upon rates; and regulatory agency interaction on behalf of each client, if needed. Each Project Manager is also assigned a Project Assistant to help handle the many administrative requirements associated with each project, and because each Project Assistant works closely with a specific Project Manager, every client always has at least two primary contacts within the laboratory who are closely involved with their project.
Assisting the Project Management and technical staff with the evaluation and implementation of laboratory regulatory compliance criteria is the laboratory’s Quality Assurance and Safety Officer. With over 15 years of experience in environmental chemistry at both bench and management levels, the Quality Assurance and Safety Officer’s primary objective is to ensure that the laboratory technical staff provides each client with analytical data of highest documented quality, while maintaining a laboratory working environment that is safe for all ELAB, Inc. employees and visitors. With a thorough knowledge of analytical methodology quality control criteria from a wide spectrum of sources, including federal EPA, NELAC, US Department of Defense, US Department of Energy, and many state environmental regulatory agencies; as well as a solid understanding of common laboratory safety protocols as defined under OSHA, the Quality Assurance and Safety Officer regularly conducts systems, proficiency and safety audits within the laboratory; assists in data package compilation and review; organizes, presides over and participates in numerous employee training sessions; and assists the laboratory’s technical, managerial and Project Management staff in its continuous evaluation of the operations at ELAB, Inc.
Assisting the Laboratory Director in a technical capacity is the Laboratory Manager. With over 15 years of experience in analytical chemistry and microbiology at both bench and management levels, the Laboratory Manager’s primary responsibility is to assure that all departments within the laboratory operate smoothly and efficiently as one cohesive unit in order to meet client project turnaround time objectives. He acts as the laboratory’s primary resource allocation conduit, interfacing directly with Project Management staff to make sure instrument and staff resources are available to meet client testing requirements; he maintains technical operations oversight for the Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS), making sure that client sample flow processes are operating efficiently and at the required capacity; and he maintains management oversight for each of the laboratory’s seven technical operations units.
At the head of each of the laboratory’s seven technical divisions is an experienced and degreed Group Leader. Each Department Manager has a minimum of 5 years analytical bench experience, and is responsible for their operation’s technical, administrative and financial oversight. As the senior staff member in each department, the Group Leader trains all chemists, microbiologists and technicians to perform all analyses and supporting functions within their section to specifications defined by state and federal regulatory criteria and detailed in laboratory Standard Operating Procedures (SOP); maintains all section laboratory instrumentation and supporting equipment; maintains stocks of appropriate analytical standards and reagents necessary to support their section’s certified list of analyses; and schedules all analyses or supporting operations within their section, with the ultimate goal of meeting the laboratory’s clients’ technical and turnaround time objectives.
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