It's Time to Ditch Big Box Calibration Services

You need calibration services. There’s no way around it.

What don’t you need? Confusion. Headaches. Regulatory hassles. Sharon in Marketing—just at all. (Does she do anything other than steal yogurts?)

But we can focus on Sharon some other time. For now, we need to ask a serious question: What’s standing in the way of your ensuring product quality and hitting compliance benchmarks every time? Big Box calibration services, plain and simple.

In today’s post, let’s take a look at how this broken Big Box approach affects quality control (and the people who are responsible for it), as well as what we can do about it.

Calibration: The Broken “Big Box” Approach             

Let’s be real: Calibration services shouldn’t be hard to find. It’s a mission-critical and high-expertise arena, yes, but it’s pretty simple when you get right down to it.

You deserve to know your tools are working the way they should. Whether you’re worried about flow meter calibration, the calibration gauge pressure systems required, multimeter calibration services, or anything else, you deserve help on which you can rely.

Enter giant corporations like Tektronix, Trescal, SIMPCO, and Transcat.

As these Big Box companies snap up and consolidate the local service providers on which this industry was built, reliable calibration services are becoming harder to find. This leaves quality managers frantically googling “calibration companies near me” and coming up shorthanded, while calibration technician careers increasingly unfold under the umbrella of corporate paradigms rather than old-fashioned quality service.

Just as Amazon and Walmart have replaced the mom-and-pop shops in local and regional communities, these mega-companies are eroding the foundation of the American manufacturing sector: calibration services.

Um. No thanks.

At the risk of sounding like toddlers, can we just say this isn’t fair? And it’s not hypothetical, either. If calibration didn’t matter all that much, we wouldn’t have historic events such as the International Metrology Day 150th Anniversary, celebrating the 150th anniversary of metrology. It does matter because knowing your tools are giving you accurate results is key to your peace of mind and your product’s quality.

Small businesses used to provide such peace of mind. Today? Not so much.

An Asteroid’s Worth of Impacts

We’ve got a math problem here, and not the fun kind. To wit, there are 33.2 million businesses in the United States as of 2024, 31.7 million of which are small businesses. There are only 20,000 large corporations.

Yet these small, local, family-owned operations account for only 43.5 percent of the economic activity in America.

To save you the math, that means 99.9% of all the companies in America are considered small, yet put together, they’re generating less than half of total business revenue.

Here’s the math problem: What gives?

And the answer: You already know what gives. Large corporations, with their focus on board-room opinions and investor profits, are an insatiable maw snapping up good service providers in their race for ever-greater windfalls. When it comes to calibration services, that results in:

• Confusing pricing structures

• Ballooning costs

• Poor customer service

• Long turnaround times

• Disruptions to manufacturing

• Danger to your reputation

That’s before we discuss the regulatory hell that often results. See, Big Box companies pretend to bring you standardization and reliability, but what they’re really bringing you is their interest in profits.

In other words, they’re not bringing you anything extra—they’re endangering your workflow and your good name.

Welcome to the Regulatory Maze (You’ll Be Here Awhile)

No matter who you answer to, from AASHTO to NADCAP and everything in between, you face stringent quality standards and steep repercussions for failing to meet them.

The need for good calibration services is agnostic to industry. Educational institutions, aerospace and defense, and general manufacturing—are all required to meet regulations.

Even with reliable calibration services, this isn’t easy. Quality managers spend a lot of their time feeling anxious, frustrated, and vulnerable when staring down that looming compliance barrel. Add in unreliable calibration partners, and you might as well call it a day and just go fishing. (Forever. Can anyone recommend a nice, free shack in the woods?)

The truth is, you should never have to:

• Compromise safety or get thrown under the bus when things go wrong

• Fail your audits or even worry about doing so

• Deal with ballooning prices that demand sacrifice

• Feel like another number in some long-term board-room plan

You should never have to think about calibration, period, because you should always have a trusted partner ready. You deserve a one-stop shop with local roots that makes you feel as though you matter right then.

Here at Accredited Labs, we think it’s time to reclaim old values of quality, accuracy, predictability, and efficiency with onsite calibration services. Compliance should not be a burden; seamless workflows should not be a pipe dream.

These should be achievable goals, day in and day out.

Good news: They can be.

Is There a Better Way?

Dealing with unreliable service and slow turnaround times is the pits. So just… stop. There’s a better way.

Accredited Labs has decades of experience helping quality managers like you stay compliant with ease. We are ISO/IEC 17025 accredited, with a 90% customer retention rate that demonstrates our commitment to calibration services at the local level.

All you have to do is submit a list of your equipment, get your quote, and schedule service. Bada bing, bada boom. You’re compliant and audit-ready, just like that.

Now, you can focus on delivering quality without disruptions by scheduling your calibration services today. In the meantime, request a free consultation to learn more about how we can help you stay compliant and headache-free. (If we could only get rid of Sharon too…)