In the chemicals industry, safety is priority number one. But how do you ensure safety in a sustainable way? When it comes to calibration, the answer is a modern, digitalized, and automated solution.

There’s a reason safety is so important in the chemicals industry. If something goes wrong, it’s not just an issue for the plant and its employees – it can also impact people living in the surrounding area. This is one of the reasons that chemicals are so strictly regulated. 

Service companies that perform calibrations for the process industries operate in a challenging environment. Not only is there a lot of competition, but contracts for customers are based on estimates, meaning that every additional hour of work directly affects the bottom line. Finding and retaining skilled calibration technicians is also a challenge.

So, what can service companies do to make their quotations more accurate and ensure work is carried out as consistently and efficiently as possible? The answer is to automate the calibration process.

Safety and compliance are non-negotiable in the fine chemicals industry, which produces complex, pure chemical substances such as active pharmaceutical ingredients. Fine chemicals are batch driven, with complicated, multistage processes where accuracy and efficiency are critical. 

In this industry, one of the keys to ensuring both safety and compliance is that measurements taken throughout the production process are accurate, which can be challenging to say the least with paper-based calibration. Paper-based calibration is time consuming and because it relies on manual data entry, prone to errors.

A Tale of Three Steves

Stephen Jerge, Calibration Supervisor for Lonza Biologics, a multinational chemical and biotechnology company, recently walked attendees of the Beamex Annual Calibration Exchange (ACE) through the project he headed to transition from a paper-based calibration management system (CMS) to an integrated, digital, paperless solution using Beamex CMX. Steve has over 30 years of calibration experience in the telecommunication and pharmaceutical industries.

Over the last 3 years, his primary focus has been contributing to Lonza’s global paperless SAP/CMX integrated solution through implementation, training, and supporting calibration operations and expansion projects.

Watch the presentation video recording now!

In this blog post, we’ll share The Tale of Three Steve’s as we follow his journey from 2017 Steve, a stressed-out, overworked supervisor; to 2019 Steve as he underwent the rollout of a new, automated system; to Steve 2021, whose focus is on continuous improvement.

Many businesses still use a lot of manual entry in their industrial processes.

This is despite the fact that it is commonly known and accepted that it is a slow and labor-intensive process and there are always human errors related to manual data entry - Human errors are natural.

It is commonly accepted that the typical error rate in manual data entry is about 1 %.

What does this 1 % mean in practice in calibration processes, and how can you make it smaller, or even get rid of it?

This article mainly focuses on industrial calibration processes and the manual data entry related to these processes.