Well, it looks like we have another winter storm bearing down on the NC area tonight with freezing rain expected most of tonight and tomorrow. Our people went home early today and we expect that road conditions will not allow us to open the NC office on Wednesday, so if you try to call us you may get our voice machine with the number for the “on call” folks. Bear with us, we will be back open as soon as we can. In the meantime our AZ and OR offices are open as usual if you need an immediate response.
There was nothing on TV tonight except a program showcasing very cute and sometimes thought provoking commercials, obviously sponsored by the NFL, since they had a game going on between the commercials that you could sort of watch, unless you had to go to the bathroom, or the snack table before the commercials came back on. Anyway, I was surfing the web looking for deals and information on flow devices when I noticed how many flow service companies state they are ISO 17025 or some other number, compliant. A very few state they are ISO accredited, Coastal Instruments being one of those. What is the difference?
A company that claims to be ISO compliant is saying that they know what the number is, they might have a copy of the regulations, and they are sure they are doing everything by the book, or at least everything that was easy to do, because, well…… because they said so.
A company that is ISO accredited will ALWAYS list an accreditation certificate number, and usually the name of the approved accreditation company they used to certify their compliance to the specifications. These independent companies are certified to perform ISO accreditation audits that require a knowledgeable auditor(s) to spend several days on site verifying compliance to EVERY line item in the respective regulation and continuing follow up audits on a regular basis, by a different auditor each time. This is a very easy thing to check. Go to the web site of the accreditation company and see if the certificate is listed. If it is, they are, if it is not, they are not. This certificate will also state the specific parameters, range of values, the uncertainty of the measurement error, technology, or products that are included in the accreditation. Some companies use their accreditation for one parameter to infer they are accredited for others. If their certificate says they are accredited for pressure or voltage, etc. over a specific range of values, then that is all they are accredited to do. They may do any other service as they like, but it will not be under the accreditation to the ISO specification.
The overwhelming majority of the effort, and cost, to meet the requirements of an ISO regulation is the work required to develop, document, and implement the procedures prior to any attempt to become accredited.. If a company is truly ISO compliant, meaning they have all those systems in place, would it not make sense that they would expend the relatively small incremental effort and expense to gain accreditation?
Coastal Instruments, Inc. is accredited by the American Association of Laboratory Accreditation to ISO/IEC 17025:2005 & ANSI/NCSL Z540-1-1994, Certificate Number: 2235.01. Check it out yourself at http://www.a2la.org/scopepdf/2235-01.pdf. We are very proud of the effort it took to earn and maintain that certificate, and for the assurance of quality that it gives our customers.
Bottom line, if a company makes claims that they are compliant with an ISO regulation without offering any accreditation, they are most likely NOT. What else are they NOT doing to assure the quality of your product?
I think the commercial special is over now, I wonder if Swamp People is on?
Well, by now you have probably heard that we have some pretty unusual weather in the eastern NC area. We don’t see much snow and ice here and, when we do, it shuts everything down. As you can see from this pic of the highway to our office it is solid ice and we have asked our employees to stay home until the conditions are safe to drive. If you need assistance before we get back in the office we have phone numbers on our message machine that you can use to contact our on-call people. Also our AZ and OR offices are working as usual so they can help you as well. We expect it will be Monday, 2/3/14, before we get our NC office back in full operation. Thanks for your patience.
We would like to welcome the newest member of the Coastal Instruments, Inc. team, Josh Trillizio, who has joined us in our North Carolina office as Information Technology Technician. We will probably cook something to celebrate, we usually do.
A big thank you to all of our employees for their continued commitment and hard work, and to our customers for entrusting us with their business in 2013. Happy New Year to all from Coastal Instruments, Inc..
All Coastal-US offices will be closed for the holidays December 23-27, 2013, and January 1, 2014. As always, if you need assistance during this time we will have emergency contact phone numbers available on the answering machines at each of US offices.
Merry Christmas and a Happy Holiday season from all of us at Coastal.
We decorated the Ural side car to ride in the local Christmas parade as our Coastal Instruments, Inc. float, but the weather was so bad we decided to skip the parade. Since we already had it decorated we hated to waste our effort, so Bob and Syd decided to just ride around town and have our own parade on Tuesday night. Here’s our ride in front of our company tree. We had fun without the parade.
Coastal Instruments, your Mass Flow Controller Specialists for the last 33 years, is proud to announce our capability to service the Horiba STEC Z-300 series devices. This includes the Z-300, Z-310, Z-312, and Z-314 models. In case you are wondering, the Z-300 is the same as the Z-500 series device but it is configured to operate with the LAM tool digital protocol. As usual, you have already been told that no else can service these, and as usual, you have been misinformed, again. If you have these and need service or replacement devices setup to your exact specifications, give us a call. 1-800-632-4357.