Maintain Product Safety With A Calibration Form

What are calibration forms?

A calibration form serves to maintain the accuracy of measuring instruments. It helps to ensure the optimal functionality of equipment to avoid damage to the company’s reputation. But what exactly are recalibrations and why are they so important?

This article discusses:

1. What are calibration forms?

2. Procedure for a calibration

3. 3 helpful tips on how to comply with calibration standards

4. Items that need recalibration

5. The advantages of digital calibration forms

What are calibration forms?

Measurements—or in their natural form—numbers are hard to visualize as they sometimes represent abstract concepts. And they also need to have a frame of reference to determine the correct tolerance. But what is the correct tolerance for the device you’re calibrating? How do you know you’re calibrating your device correctly, or if you’re paying someone to do it incorrectly? There’s a lot more to calibrating than what initially meets the eye, but don’t worry, we’ll get into all the nitty, gritty details later. For right now, regardless of your knowledge about the correct tolerances, a poorly calibrated or neglected device can have real-world ramifications.

For example, no one wakes up in the morning and just thinks, “Hmm, I need to calibrate my laptop battery.” It’s just…not the most exciting thing that could ever be written on a to-do list, but out of sight does not mean out of mind. Maybe you can get away with not calibrating your outdoor grill or toilet, but there’s some equipment, especially in the corporate and scientific realm that could have career-ending consequences if you let the regular maintenance of these machines or devices falls to the wayside.

A Calibration forms template helps your business to adhere to exact device standards in order not to endanger your company (or others) and to create optimal working conditions for your employees.

What is the correct procedure for a calibration record template?

The calibration of measuring instruments is carried out by quality managers as part of an internal quality management system. The ISO 9001:2015 serves as a useful companion and also helps to ensure the necessary quality and safety standards are being adhered to. In a calibration log template, the following information can be found:

1. Definition of the measurement process
2. Creation of a model for calibration evaluation
3. Performing the calibration
4. Documentating deviation and calibration results

What are 3 helpful tips on how to comply with calibration log standards?

A calibration standard follows strict guidelines that ensure the functionality and quality of the equipment.

• Regular Maintenance
  By carrying out regular maintenance such as calibration checks, you stay in control of the equipment in your company. In this way, unnecessary risks and damages are minimized.
• Immediate Problem Reporting
  A decisive step is the reporting of results that deviate from the standard. If the instrument measurements show errors, it’s important to report the deviations immediately so the responsible staff can correct them.
• Documentation
  The calibration protocol should be recorded without fail in order to prove the suitability for ISO 9001:2015 certification.

For each part of the process, there’s an important step for adhering to the ISO 9001:2015 guidelines. Without these safe gaps, there could be terrible health and safety consequences to your employees or customers. One specific example of this is a refrigerator, freezer, or holding cabinets thermometers. If the thermometers aren’t calibrated correctly and, as a consequence, the temperature was either set too high or too low, food could spoil.

Maybe it’s off by just a few degrees. Maybe that doesn’t sound like a big deal. But if your refrigerator is already set at the maximum end of the holding temperature range (the FDA recommends a refrigerator be set at a holding temperature of 40 degrees Fahrenheight), and the thermometer was off by a few degrees so, in reality, the actual temperature of your refrigerator is 45 degrees Fahrenheit, bacteria has optimal grounds for multiplying out of control. The next thing you know the CDC is knocking on your door with a heavy fine and a court date, saying you’re responsible for the most recent Ebola outbreak. On the contrary, if you had used a thermometer calibration log template, things might have turned out differently.

What devices need to be calibrated?

It’s important to keep in mind that, depending on how you plan to use a device or tool, the needs of calibration might differ. For example, if you have a device that has multiple functions, but is only using it to measure height instead of, say, the diameter or straightness of an object, it doesn’t make sense to calibrate the device functions that you’re not going to use. That’s just a waste of time and money. However, you should still know how, when, and at what intervals your devices will need recalibration.

Here is a list of just a few examples of items that need to be regularly recalibrated to maintain device integrity:

• Medical equipment
• Lab equipment
• Centrifuges
• Construction tools
• Computers
• Touch screens
• Guages
• Lasers
• GPS
• Vehciles

As you can see from the above examples, failure to recalibrate any of these devices corresponding to the manufacturer’s recommendations could compromise the quality and safety of the product. Depending on what you’re using the product for, this could have varying degrees of severity.

For example, what if a laser being used in surgery was off by a few millimeters? That may not seem like a lot, but in medical terminology, you might as well be talking about a matter of life and death. A major artery might be millimeters away from the operation site. What then?

A calibration sheet template might seem like a dull, time-consuming topic easy to cut corners and forget about, but when it really comes down to it, your business could hinge on your ability to recalibrate your tools correctly

Sure, you don’t really need to recalibrate your bathroom scale for perfect accuracy, but who really wants to know their real weight? Everyone already lies about it on their driver’s license anyway. What it really comes down to is: how important is it that the measurements are accurate? In a home setting, maybe it doesn’t matter so much. In a business setting? Well, sending someone a hand-made piece of furniture in the wrong dimensions might compromise your business’s reputation.

What are the advantages of digital calibration form template?

With digital calibration forms, you can easily carry out regular content checks via tablet or smartphone – online or offline. Using the desktop software, you can record measurements and then evaluate the collected data. For example, you can directly identify information about measuring device malfunctions and solve incidents up to four times faster.

• The flexible form builder from Lumiform helps you to convert any individual paper list into a digital checklist with little effort.
• Using the super intuitive app, you and your teammates can conduct checks in the field with ease.
• Comprehensive analyses help you to identify inefficient areas in your company more quickly and, thus, continuously improve your auditing and inspection processes.
• Save time by making it easier to analyze all the data from the calibration log and quickly identify areas that need your attention.