Hi. I'm Bob Stern. I'm a Senior Metrologist at Agilent Technologies. We're going to
cover all of the kinds of questions that I hear most often from colleagues, from customers
and folks that are on the standards committees.
So here is the list of topics that we'll be covering in the series. Right now we're
going to go into Why Calibrate.
Before we begin, I want to talk just a little bit about philosophy.
For 60 years the philosophy at Hewlett Packard Test and Measurement, it was all about accurate
measurements. That's what we did.
And since the year 2000 you know us as Agilent Technologies. We are the premier measurement
company and we strive just as HP did to always make as accurate a measurement as absolutely
possible at every step in the product life cycle when we're designing instruments,
when we build them and when we calibrate them.
So perhaps it's no surprise that in the Agilent service support organization, our
passion -- and you may detect this as you listen to me in this series -- is all about
accurate measurements. The only unique thing about what we do in accurate measurements
in the service sector is that the device under test is your instrument.
I like to start out any discussion about calibration with an open question. "Why calibrate?"
What I hear most often is some people will say, "Well, we need to meet ISO 9001 for
quality audit requirements."
"Okay." Sometimes I hear, "Well, we need to validate the design or manufacturing
processes to make sure they're under statistical control or often to make sure that they're
within an established system error budget.
And finally most often on the aerospace defense area, I will hear people saying, "Hey, we
need to make sure that our armed forces never have a bad day." Each of these is a different
use case for instruments and what you'll see reflects different deliverables and requirements
for calibration. So throughout the series hopefully we will address all three of these
use cases so that you can say depending on where you fit which calibration service and
which deliverables are most important to your company.
Now before we jump into calibration, I want to why do you buy Agilent instruments? When
you select a particular product, you may very well know from our website many of our product
lines have lots of instruments. This one happens to be spectrum analyzers and notice that there
are 30 different model numbers. So how do you select which model number you want? Most
customers tell me you determine those specifications which are critical to your organization and
then you look through a table like this one and the model which is least expensive that
covers those critical specs is the one that you buy or one above it.
That's what you do when you buy the instrument. Our question to you is are you going to rely
on those same critical specifications the next year, five years later or even beyond
that? Because if you are, calibration is really important. Because the calibration determines
the real specifications that you're presently operating to when your instrument is measured
just like we did when we originally built it and shipped it to you the first time.
Whenever I'm in person I like to stop and ask the audience this question. "When you
send your instrument into a calibration lab, what do you expect them to do?"
This is a fairly comprehensive definition of what calibration is. It is the process
where you verify instrument specifications by measuring actual performance using external
lab standards, normally instruments, which in turn have better performance and which
are traceable to the International System of Units via one of the National Metrology
Institutes who themselves are signatories of the Mutual Recognition Agreement.
You know, if you're a metrologist, you probably agree with everything I said and that's
completely correct. But there's a lot of folks out there who would say, "Wow, that
was a bit much."
So I want to show you a much simpler operating definition which isn't quite as complete
but which covers the main elements and here it is.
This is how we define it at Agilent. We measure the actual performance of every warranted
specification for every installed option and we do that every time -- every spec, every
option, every time. Real simple to remember. That's how you know that your instrument
is still operating like it did when we shipped it to you.
Now this is a good point for me to mention a cautionary note and that is if you are being
offered functional tests, a functional test does not test the actual performance. You
want actual performance of all of those measurements. That's how you do calibration.
As part of the new product introduction for every new instrument, we develop a series
of performance tests and these are designed to measure the actual performance of all of
the warranted specifications. So here you see an example for one of our high performance
spectrum analyzers and you'll see that depending on which model there's over 40 different
performance tests.
What I'd like to do now is we're going to run through a little series and you're
going to see on the upper line some measurements that Agilent did and this is an actual comparison
where there was another lab that also measured this RF signal generator. So everywhere you
see a green dot, it means that's an actual measurement that was performed.
The important thing to note here is suppose your company is depending on the specification.
You bought that instrument from that earlier chart that I showed and you bought it on the
basis of any of the specifications that are inside the yellow oval. In this case those
were not measured so you don't know. That's why at Agilent we feel it's important to
measure every spec every time.
Now everybody in your company contributes to the overall success of your business.
Who in your company is responsible for measurement? If you're listening to this and you're
responsible for measurement, part of that responsibility is to find out more about calibration,
get involved and you can trust but make sure you verify that the specifications that your
company counts on are being measured accurately during calibration.
Now what I'd like to show you is when I said trust but verify, how do you do that?
You can do a sample audit. Find and instrument that you like to use on a frequent basis,
identify the key specs that you bought it for and make sure that you understand which
specs is your company depending on. Then look at the measurement report that you receive
in calibration and you should be able to identify which tests were conducted that verify those
particular specifications.
If you didn't receive a measurement report, frankly that's a red flag. If you happen
to send it to Agilent, we will give you a measurement report for every measured result
either before -- if we do adjustments, you will get a before adjustments and after adjustments
report. Every measurement that we make you will get a record of that.
If you're sending your instruments to Agilent, we post online all of your measurement results
and they're available at any time 24/7 for up to seven years. I have a printed out version
of one of those with me right now and this is for a PXI spectrum analyzer just as an
example. So what you receive is that full trace report and a summary of tests and in
addition to your calibration certificate, you'll get a measurement result of all the
tests that we ran. And in addition if we found it necessary to run adjustments, you'll
also receive a second report of all the measurements that we performed after the adjustments were
finished.
So that brings us to the end of the first module on Why Calibrate. We have a number
of other modules that we've put together that we think will be of real interest to
you and I hope that you'll consider watching those as well and I look forward to seeing
you again soon. Thank you.