Standards ‘R Us

What a mess our lives would be without standards. We expect to be able to move from our car, office, and our home with the use of a singular device. This has not been achieved yet, but “standards” are constantly being developed to allow the interchangeability of data and devices.

Today, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, there are close to 900,000 global standards. Virtually all these standards were developed over the past 150 years. The use of standards began by standardizing the “screw thread”. Standardization of the screw thread allowed mass production of interchangeable parts, which kicked off the Industrial Revolution. (For those of you who are interested, email us and we will send you a reprint of an article that details the efforts of William Sellers, a machinist from Philadelphia, who fought to get the Navy to formulate standards for screw threads.)

The contour projector (the initial product produced by QVI and still sold worldwide) was originally developed in Springfield, Vermont for the inspection of screw threads to comply with standards. Springfield, Vermont was the birthplace of machine tools that were used for the mass production of interchangeable parts. The optical technology that is used today in QVI products also began in the “Precision Valley” of Vermont.

So, which standards are important to me? For those of us in manufacturing, ISO 9000 has become an international reference for quality requirements in business-to-business dealings. The “International Organization for Standardization” (ISO – www.iso.ch) is a non-governmental organization made up of members from 148 countries. ISO develops primarily technical standards which contribute to making the development, manufacturing, and supply of products and services more efficient, safer, and cleaner.

ISO 9000_2015 is concerned with “quality management” – what an organization does to enhance customer satisfaction by meeting applicable regulatory requirements and improving its performance. A subset of ISO 9000 is ISO 17025, which is the “General Requirements for the Competence of Testing and Calibration Laboratories” which outlines the requirements for test and calibration of measurement systems like those manufactured by View. Since ISO standards are voluntary, “certification” and “registration” must be accomplished by an independent entity. Quality Vision Services, View’s service organization, is certified and registered (sometimes referred to as “accredited”) through the American Association for Laboratory Accreditation. Our certification number is 1864.01.

Check out https://www.a2la.org/ for more information and a listing of our accreditation.