WIND SERVICE COMPANY CALIBRATION
A strategy that consolidates all tool management and compliance data for widely dispersed mobile service techs
The client partners with its vendor and cuts the chaos out of mobile asset management
PROBLEM
Multiple field techs were managing numerous tools,
all scattered across the country, each technician
tracking their own paperwork, calibration certificates,
training and safety certifications and documentation,
which created a chaotic mixture of homemade
spreadsheets, disparate software systems and
paper-based management - a compliance nightmare
with enormous time overhead that was repeated
month after month.
SOLUTION
ALLTITE mobile laboratories provided on-site service
inside the narrow window during the field service
techs' annual safety training at home base. All data
documentation, tool and safety documentation were
loaded into ALLTITE's TorqueWarePRO™ asset
management software. ALLTITE prorated the annual
calibration bill and split it into monthly payments
to ease the transition from monthly recalibration to a
single calibration event.
RESULTS
Inside eight weeks, the client's entire field service
team was 100% calibrated and safety compliant, with
all data on a single software system, securely updated
by any data manger from any data entry point.
ONGOING
The client simply maintains the system and deals
with calibration and compliance only once, at the
beginning of the year, rather than month by month,
recovering hundreds of hours of time on data entry
and file uploads.on continuous improvement and
manufacturing excellence.
Any field-service business faces the challenges of multiple service techs managing and controlling equipment across vast, often remote, geography. The possibility of losing certificates and documentation is high. In regulated industries, where training and safety are vital, these management tasks become critical. Poor management and spotty records can shut down work, or worse, get a contractor removed from a site. Highly trained technicians with highly accurate tools still need to produce proof of compliance on the spot. Audits can uncover gaps in the records, out-of-date calibrations and incorrectly documented annual safety courses.
Historically, this tracking has required the painstaking manual entry of volumes of tedious data into a homemade Excel spreadsheet by one person tasked with updating and uploading certificates. Typically, tools and equipment have varying dates of calibration, so a batch of certificates is always expiring. When the certificate comes due, the tool must be located, taken out of service, assigned a purchase order, boxed, shipped and remain out of service until it's shipped back from a remote lab. Then the tool must be inspected, inventoried and the data updated in the spreadsheet. Imagine that process multiplied by the thousands of tools in the the client's inventory, and the possibility of tools "falling through the cracks in understandably high.
We are spending too much time trying to manually keep up with the demands of expiring calibrations and certifications that is putting work in the field at risk," said the Division Project Manager.
The client already had a process in place that brings their field technicians back to headquarters for annual safety training, continuing education and safety recertifications during the slow period every January and February. ALLTITE saw this as the perfect time to send its mobile labs to calibrate all of the tools coming back from the field while the technicians were on site. By the time the techs finished training, their calibrated tools were ready to go for the next year.
ALLTITE's proprietary TorqueWare Pro software serves as a repository for calibration records, but also manages any assets that need to be grouped or tracked, whether they' re calibrated tools or other assets. The client immediately recognized the potential to track their calibration records and their technicians' safety certifications in the same program. Karl Kruse, ALLTITE's Director of Information Technology partnered with the Project Manager to design a program for internal asset organization and imported the documents into TorqueWare PRO.
All the calibration certificates. asset lists, safety certificates and documentation were linked to a QR code. In the field, these were printed on a label attached to the field technician's hard hat and ID badge. Grouping the tools by QR code assigns accountability to each field technician. A customer or auditor can snap the QR code from a smartphone to quickly retrieve all the compliance documentation, as well as the tool list that the technician is responsible for, and email or text it to whoever wants it.
ALLTITE maintains a network of mobile calibration vans networked together by our cloud-based software system. Any van can provide service to a customer in any location, and the technician can aggregate the data package regardless of the data entry point. With all data in the same database, ALLTITE could sync data between two vans and double the calibration achieved inside the narrow window of time. ALLTITE provided ISO-17025 accredited calibration service for all the calibration types at the client's site, including physical dimensional, electrical measuring, torque, pressure and pyrometry tools.
"Our goal was to use the safety meeting as an opportunity to offer a seamless integration between the client's service technicians and the project managers. Once the calibration records were uploaded by our ALLTITE techs during the safety meeting, then using TorqueWare PRO, we were able to work with the Project Manager to give him the autonomy to assemble a cloud-based program that would group and organize the remainder of the documents required for on-site compliance." said Kruse.