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Analytical Testing Laboratory: User Testimonial

INDUSTRY

Agricultural, Animal Feed, Fuels

PRIMARY VALUE

Regulatory Compliance, Process Optimization

PREVIOUS PROCESS

Building Management System

APPLICATION

Lab Monitoring

Read Testimonial

Analytical Testing Lab Switches to Elemental Machines

This full-scale analytical testing laboratory offers analysis to a wide array of industries including: Agriculture, Animal Feed, Environmental, Food, Fuels, and Pet Food.

col2Problem

The laboratory was using a homemade system of continuous monitoring nodes for tracking their equipment.

“The nodes were wired into panels. We had to run wires all the way through equipment, drill holes in them. It was a pretty crude system. We built the software around it utilizing offsets from an HVAC
company,” said Jessica, head of Quality Assurance.

In addition to being a crude system that involved a lot of manual set-up time, the alerts system was
complicated to set up and required regular calibration.

In addition, their lab is required to be NIST compliant, which means all of the equipment must be
serialized and accounted for with NIST on a yearly basis. Getting their homemade system compliant,
required two people spending 2 months of working time per year to verify all of the equipment.

Solution

The laboratory decided to implement Elemental Machines. All of EM’s equipment is NIST traceable so
it can be immediately installed and used in their lab.

Elemental Machines also implemented a custom calibration feature that allows the laboratory to hire
a 3rd party calibrator or use their own staff to calibrate devices. This is a huge time saver as they do
not have to manually calibrate the equipment internally as they did with their previous setup.


“Any suggestions that we have, they are always willing to listen to us,” Jessica said. “One of the biggest things they implemented recently was a calibration dashboard so we could put offsets in there when we do our annual verification.”


The flexibility of the alerting system has been a boon for the laboratory’s operations as well.
“We’re able to set different alerts per department. Some departments want alerts and notifications
every few minutes, some once an hour. The system is very flexible and can meet what the department
supervisors want to know,” Jessica said.

Results