Have a question my boss and I seem to be at a stalemate on - he is more of an engineering background so I think it may be a little hard to get him to understand what we're attempting to accomplish on the Quality side.
We have a large tape measure calibrated (out side of our company, of course - which is generally how we do calibration), after that returns, take the tape measures used in RI and Final Inspection and verify those tapes against the calibrated one, and slap a certified sticker on them, saying that they are good.
The round about is that in our tool maintenance and calibration procedure, the definitions are
VERIFICATION: tool measurements-error confirmed to be less than or equal to our defined maximum permissible error.
CERTIFICATION: Approval usually done in house for the use of production tooling after verification that they are acceptably accurate, in acceptable working condition and capable of fulfilling intended functions.
If the procedure says calibration/verification, how does that ensure we don't have a non-conformance?
To add to that - we don't calibrate anything in house - EXCEPT for a scale in which we use calibrated weights, and a pull tester - again using calibrated weights - and most of the time the scale is used for final acceptance...
Anyway - the concern is
a) using the tape measures that have been 'verified' against the calibrated tape but are called certified by our definition - is that a non-conformance since they aren't actually calibrated?
b) the 2 items that we DO calibrate (scale and pull tester), what in the world do we call those? We've been calling them calibrated all this time, but now the question is if that's the right thing to call them.
We have a large tape measure calibrated (out side of our company, of course - which is generally how we do calibration), after that returns, take the tape measures used in RI and Final Inspection and verify those tapes against the calibrated one, and slap a certified sticker on them, saying that they are good.
The round about is that in our tool maintenance and calibration procedure, the definitions are
VERIFICATION: tool measurements-error confirmed to be less than or equal to our defined maximum permissible error.
CERTIFICATION: Approval usually done in house for the use of production tooling after verification that they are acceptably accurate, in acceptable working condition and capable of fulfilling intended functions.
If the procedure says calibration/verification, how does that ensure we don't have a non-conformance?
To add to that - we don't calibrate anything in house - EXCEPT for a scale in which we use calibrated weights, and a pull tester - again using calibrated weights - and most of the time the scale is used for final acceptance...
Anyway - the concern is
a) using the tape measures that have been 'verified' against the calibrated tape but are called certified by our definition - is that a non-conformance since they aren't actually calibrated?
b) the 2 items that we DO calibrate (scale and pull tester), what in the world do we call those? We've been calling them calibrated all this time, but now the question is if that's the right thing to call them.
