by Howard Zion
The universe of Inspection, Measurement, and Test Equipment (IMTE) encompasses so many independent manufacturer/model numbers that it can become extremely difficult to manage, whether for the company that owns the equipment or the suppliers from whom the equipment owners purchase the equipment and/or suppliers that are used to service the equipment for calibration, adjustment, preventive maintenance, and repair. Over the past 15 years, Transcat has developed a hierarchy that is extremely effective for organizing the universe of IMTE into Categories, Disciplines, Groups, and Sub-Groups. This hierarchy has been loosely referred to as the Periodic Table of Metrology (hence the “-ish” in the title). While it is not necessarily periodic in nature, as is the Periodic Table of the Elements, there are some patterns associated with this hierarchy that bear some similarity to it. This system has been used for tracking equipment types (subgroups) in databases and spreadsheets, for assigning qualification of technicians by subgroups, for determining list pricing of services, discounting schemes, training of personnel, routing of equipment to service centers and to individual workstations, determination of lab standards required for calibration, development of standard service times and standard cost models, identification of ‘new capability’ development, reporting and management of client inventories, et.al. It has become the skeletal structure of our business and has many other applications that may be useful. READ FULL ARTICLE (PDF)
