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This article is concerned mainly with the first category of system – calibration management software for owners of measuring equipment – with references to calibration software where it could be of interest to those owners who do some of their own calibration.
There is a wide range of physical environments, operational practices, calibration requirements and IT resources to be found across industry, all of which affect the calibration management system best suited to a particular organisation. Consider, for example: a large automotive component manufacturing plant; an aerospace company; a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant; a small turned-part machine shop. If you looked at a successful calibration management installation in each of these you would find different critical features.
It follows that when considering the purchase and installation of a new computer-based calibration management system, you should make a careful evaluation of your own system functional requirements before assessing the market offerings.
This article outlines some of the main issues which could affect your choice of system and then presents a check list which you can use as a basis for software package comparison and evaluation.
Not all the features and influences mentioned here will be of interest – indeed, half of them will probably be completely irrelevant to your circumstances and requirements. By the same token, glowing references or derogatory comments concerning a particular package from another user, whose requirements or environment differ from yours, may not be pertinent to your situation. As mentioned above, a system suitable for a pharmaceutical company or an aerospace company might be useless in a small turned-part company and vice-versa.
This article does not attempt to cover all the general issues that surround the selection, installation and implementation of a computer system. The assessment of IT resources in relation to any proposed software package (system capacity, networks, internet and intranet communications, operating systems, database servers, hardware, etc.) should be carried out by your IT Department. They may impose constraints on your range of choice.
Note that a calibration management software package might simply consist of an off-the-shelf spreadsheet or database system set up and maintained using in-house resources.
Finally, remember that there is no point in specifying functional features that require manual data entry (eg to track gauges around the plant, control their recall with real-time usage, record calibration results, etc) if the manpower to do this is not available.
The term measuring equipment (assets for short) includes gauges, instruments, calibration equipment, control devices, meters, probes, thermocouples – in fact anything that measures something.
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