Many customers do not consider the laboratory qualifications when they review quotations. You wouldn’t hire an employee if they didn’t meet standards set forth by your company. So why would you send your manufactured parts to a laboratory that doesn’t meet the industry standard for temperature? All laboratories quoting should be “Accredited” to ISO/IEC 17025 standard. Several laboratories get by with a statement that they are “In Compliance” to the ISO/IEC 17025 standard. Accredited laboratories are reviewed annually for competence in their calibration field.

Equipment utilized by accredited laboratories must be traceable to the National Institute of Standards Technology (N.I.S.T), with each individual piece of equipment being directly linked to N.I.S.T. These practices allow the customer to have confidence in the data results obtained by the accredited laboratory, ensuring that they followed industry standards. Labs that are “In Compliance” can easily choose which portions of the ISO/IEC standard they wish to comply with. There are no means for which the customer can be confident that all practices stated in the ISO/IEC 17025 standard are being enforced and followed throughout the inspection process.

Has the laboratory quoted the appropriate equipment to use to perform your dimensional inspection? Many customers overlook the fact that dimensional data can be obtained using several different approaches. However, each approach has its own level of uncertainty when obtaining dimensional data. Sure, it’s a lot less expensive to measure a distance on digital caliper than on a coordinate measuring machine (CMM), but you have much greater accuracies and repeatability when utilizing a CMM over a digital caliper. Bobier Metrology Solutions has state of the art measurement equipment to guarantee your measurement data is repeatable within microns.

A majority of labs base their pricing per dimension, so its equally important to make sure each laboratory has quoted the same amount of dimensions to be inspected. Every laboratory should supply within their written quotation, the number of dimensions to be inspected and a datum scheme for the inspection. Every quotation presented by Bobier Metrology Solutions will include our price based on the number of dimensions and a clear datum scheme. We also have hourly rate quotes available upon request. Once all the information has been obtained, the customer then should be able to pick the appropriate laboratory to perform their dimensional inspection based upon the laboratory qualifications, laboratory environment, type of equipment, data result formats, and lastly price.