Calibrating your Calibration Program by George Santos Norat, P.E.

 

            The importance of a calibration program is well recognized in the industry. This program is the backbone of three main aspects of a business: Safety, Quality and Process Yield. A calibration program assures the reproduction of accurate readings of actual process parameters. In addition, it guarantees the preparation of proper documented evidence of activities in order to maintain the history of each instrument in the program. There is a general perception that a calibration program is under the maintenance/technical services group to conduct calibrations of instruments before the end of the month and thus comply with the due date. If calibrations were to be completed by the last day of the month, then that is considered a “good job”. This mindset is typical in the industry and the reality is that there are costs associated with this school of thought, and they are affecting your business unit at this moment. The program administrator is aware of the several types of improvements required on a calibration program, and should know the amount of effort required to optimize said program. However, it is required to take steps towards implementing activities, and some “temporary” support is required to conduct a program recalibration.

My experience working with calibration program assessments showed that instruments reclassification will yield a 10-15% on calibrations reduction by reclassifying and removing instruments after a conscious analysis from the program. Furthermore, an instruments technician typically completes 1,250 calibrations per year, and the impact of a 10% reduction may lead to savings as demonstrated in the following chart, assuming a cost of $40,000 technician/year:

 

Program size	Calibrations per year	10% reduction	Potential savings (technician)	Potential savings ($)
3000	7500	750	0.6	$24,000
5000	12000	1200	1	$40,000
7000	15000	1500	1.2	$48,000

 

This chart describes the process I call “Calibrate your Calibration Program” in a simple mode; it is aimed to eliminate common practices that burden your organization, converting your program into a tool to assure efficiencies.

 

“Selecting Resources”

            Although the typical approach is to contract a consultant to complete an assessment of the program and provide recommendations, the best assessment was already conducted by your instruments technicians, as well as your program administrator, after several years of observing how instruments have been “over-calibrated”. Contracted consultancy should be focused on collecting this feedback and evaluating it with “experienced resources” to proceed with the instruments reclassification revision, according to program procedures. These experienced resources are typically out-sourced, and are a key element in this effort, and evidence of credentials should be requested. This experience is required to avoid having the consultants absorb plant resources by constantly asking for help because of lack of experience reviewing instrument applications to reclassify instruments.

 

“Close the faucet”

            The form used to add new instruments to your program includes a field for “instrument category”. A typical requestor, a resource with no background in metrology or instrumentation, tends to add an instrument to the calibration program with classification of “critical” to all process related instruments and specifies that it is required a calibration every three months. This happens most likely because of a lack of orientation. At this point, it is required of the program administrator to filter this request. However, the program administrator is overwhelmed coordinating month calibrations and request is forgotten “in the incoming tray”; program administrators have come to rely on the requestor to prompt attention to it. Finally, the documents are hastily approved with no/poor evaluation and a “new critical” instrument is added to the calibration program. Does these sounds familiar?

It is the responsibility of a program administrator to reinforce the elimination of this “no-win situation”. A complement to this effort should be accompanied by training the requestors on the process of evaluating new assets to be added to the program, particularly focused on classifying instruments properly.

            These two actions will assure to stop the addition of “new critical” instruments to the program and stop program burden due to addition of misclassified instrument to the program.

 

“Fix the Past History”

          Most significant opportunities are in the utilities area and thus should be focused. Although there are specific applications in the utilities area that are critical for the operations, most of the instruments are for reference only, designed to guarantee that support for the manufacturing areas is handled in an efficient manner when viewed from an engineering standpoint. Only process systems, like purified water, will have critical instruments; other instruments are critical only due to their relationship with safety or environmental issues, not the manufacturing process. Using this rationale, the first priority is to “fix the past history” within your utilities area.

            The next step is the evaluation of manufacturing instruments, using the relationship of critical instruments with documented evidence supporting batch records. There are several instruments used in manufacturing as secondary process information that are not part of any documented evidence. This is yet another area with good opportunities, and support from manufacturing and quality operations will be required to complete this evaluation.

 

Summary

            There are several additional opportunities to “cleanup” your calibration program, but as a true believer and practitioner of Pareto’s principle, the actions described above are the high impact actions that lead to a “refurbishing” of a calibration program in an effective way. An optimum combination of site resources and consultants is required to carry out the assessment in an effective manner. Furthermore, a strong technical background of outsourced resources is vital to take prompt and assertive actions during the process. In short, to “Calibrate your Calibration Program”, simply select adequate resources, “Close the faucet” and “Fix past history”.