Calibrating maintenance equipment

Hi to all.

My name is Ramon and I just started to work as Quality Engineer in a medical company, I am new in this forum, and the quality environment I wish to ask for your opinion about something that I want to learn about calibration of equipment.

In the company where I work the maintenance department have measurement equipment mainly measuring tapes and multimeter, as I am new on this company too I noticed that maintenance multimeter is under calibration program but measuring tapes are not.
The standard states that only measuring devices used for product must be calibrated.

"The organization shall determine the monitoring and measurement to be undertaken and the
monitoring and measuring equipment needed to provide evidence of conformity of product to
determined requirements."

As the company is very small there is a plant manager for all quality production and supply chain, and he says not having idea why this is like it is.
What do you suggest me to do?
Keep measurement equipment as it is
introduce measuring tapes to calibration program or
take out the multimeter.

May be is silly, and the answers may be is obvious but I believe there is maybe a specific requirement for medical devices companies I do not know.
Thank you in advance.

 

Agree with Andy. But don't necessarily be so hasty to pull the multimeters out of calibration. I can calibrate a tape measure simply by measuring a known object. Doesn't really even have to be a NIST object because like Andy says, they aren't used in controlling parts and also - it's a tape measure. Accuracy isn't great to begin with. A multimeter is not so easy to do and verify it's accurate with things lying around. I mean, you can put it across a 9 volt battery and if it say 87 volts, you know you have a problem. But if it says 7 v, it COULD be the battery. There's not rule that says you CAN'T have extra things in calibration.

 

Thank you all for your reply, I really Appreciate sharing your knowledge.
I believe the multimeter is in calibration program because auditor as Andy mentioned, I think I let the program as it is, because adding instruments to program will cause additional cost (in our case we use subcontractor for calibration as we do not have internal calibration staff)
Thank you again =)

 

It is EXACTLY this. Which is why one needs an understanding of what one is trying to test with any study and why one also needs a strong understanding of what tests are available and what ALL the results mean. Sadly, too many people want that "everything's good" magic hurdle in one number they can type in an Excel spreadsheet.

 

I believe that it is eventually the "fear" of many when it comes to being audited, so they think having everything under control will automatically solve all their problems.

 

Yeah. We do a lot just to keep the customer off our backs. It's not value added (other than it keeps the customer off our backs).

There's this undercurrent of pushing everyone into a nice, neat model. Doesn't work that way. A high speed stamping operation, for example, is going to be big into SMED. But a complex machining guy with dedicated machines that don't require much changeover, he's going to be all about poka-yokes and uptime. If you customer engineer comes from one type of background, they tend to push you to what THEY know, which in most cases doesn't work at your type of operation.

Now go global - yes, everyone needs to be doing the manufacturing 101 stuff. But cultural differences are DIFFERENT. Hell, tax laws themselves can make one thing viable in on country, and not in another.

It generates a lot of work to make us all "look the same" and the trade off is understanding what all these different methods are trying to do. Customer fear is a big part of this.