‘LOGiCAL’ Choice for Service Companies

How can service companies best deliver measurement instrumentation services and solutions to a diverse set of process industry customers? Given that contracts are based on service company estimates and technicians are expected to complete the scheduled calibration work efficiently, every extra hour of work affects the bottom line.

Beamex can help service companies in gaining a competitive advantage and meeting diverse customer requirements by allowing them to automate their calibration processes using a combination of Beamex multifunction calibrators and Beamex LOGiCAL software.

Better operational efficiency with automated calibration

Many service companies currently use traditional calibration processes. Typically, these traditional processes are highly manual and very labor-intensive. The methods used, which require a significant amount of manual data entry, can also create the possibility for errors. This can occur in the field when capturing the test data, when manually writing a calibration certificate, and when manually transferring the data back into a CMMS system or database.

An automated calibration solution replaces these manual and paper-based processes with a digital one. The device information and calibration procedures are stored in the calibration software database. Meanwhile, the required work can be easily highlighted and then sent electronically to a documenting calibrator, so the calibration can be performed. The calibrator digitally documents the calibration results – which are both time- and date-stamped and electronically signed – to the profile of the technician who performed the tests. The results are then electronically transferred to the calibration software for long-term storage, and fully traceable calibration certificates can be automatically produced at the click of a button.

Not only does this automated digital process save time and make the calibration process far more traceable, it also removes the risk of data integrity issues typically associated with manual data entry.

Increased profitability for service companies

Aside from the process improvements relating to traceability and data integrity, let’s look at what a typical service company can gain from a digital process in terms of efficiency.

The average cost to a service company for an instrument technician is around €50 (£42 or US$54) per hour, including salary, benefits, and overheads. If a technician carries out 2,000 calibrations a year, and it takes them, on average, 15 minutes to write up a calibration certificate for each calibration, then just writing up the certification alone will cost a service company €25,000 (£21,000 or US$27,000) per year. If it takes another 15 minutes to enter that data into the database, that will cost another €25,000 (£21,000 or US$27,000) per year.

In addition to the lost time, the average error rate for manual data entry is around 1 percent, so with 40–50 data entry points on each certificate, every second certificate is likely to contain incorrect data. That means the service company in this case is spending 1,000 hours – or €50,000 (£42,000 or US$54,000) – per technician, per year to capture data that is potentially only 50 percent true to the tests that were carried out in the first place. Automating the process of capturing and transferring calibration data not only improves accuracy; it saves time and money, which can be reallocated within the business.

This higher level of traceability and data integrity will enable the service company to operate and serve their customers with complete confidence in their processes and data. They may also now be more competitively priced, safe in the knowledge that their highly efficient digital process can support them in gaining a competitive advantage.

Calibration software as a service

A Beamex LOGiCAL subscription is the ideal solution for service companies as it enables them to automate their calibration process as described above. The subscription is affordable and gives both an unlimited number of users and an unlimited database of instruments, making it highly scalable for service companies as they pick up new customers. Additional payments are aligned with the level of usage, meaning they will only pay for what they use.

Since LOGiCAL is calibration software as a service (SaaS), there’s no need to install anything or maintain the solution—every time a user logs in through a web browser, they automatically have access to the most up-to-date version of the software. LOGiCAL is a dynamic solution which can quickly and easily adopt new users and the required instrument data in alignment with the changing environment within which modern service companies must operate.

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