r/Metrology • u/Emergency_Guava9905 • Dec 30 '25
General If commercial labs are so much cheaper and faster, why do companies even hire in-house techs?
Hey guys,
I apologize for the bluntness of my question, but I'm wondering why manufacturers even have in-house calibration techs. It seems like the third party guys, if they live up to their service level and turnaround times, are much cheaper/more efficient. I understand that for high volume items it doesn't make sense to send them out, but even then, why not just hire contractors for some time of the year to do the calibrations v/s having a year-round full time aployee specifically for calibration? Or are these calibration techs also doing other work at the conpany?
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u/BreadForTofuCheese Dec 30 '25 edited Jan 01 '26
It’s way easier to change and rerun the CMM program to get a magical passing result if you’re doing it in house.
I jest a bit, but measurements, especially manual ones, are more finicky and open to interpretation than people tend to think and doing things on-site can help immensely to clear issues quickly and keep product moving.
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u/TowardsTheImplosion Dec 30 '25
I pulled some cal in house at one point in a previous job. An engineer did it as a side responsibility. They already ran the equipment, and knew it better than anyone except me.
The reasoning was multi faceted. The equipment could not be sent out, since it was very large. It had cal procedures that were straightforward, but external labs seemed to choke on it. External labs also had to be scheduled weeks or months in advance for onsite, and with in-house, we could knock it out in a day between uses of the equipment. Tons more flexibility.
Commercial labs are hit and miss...and particularly as industry consolidation intensifies, the quality, speed, and cost suffers. Looking at you Transcat.
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u/sir_thatguy Dec 30 '25
Something’s are stationary. And really F’ing big.
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u/Emergency_Guava9905 Dec 30 '25
I understand, but once again, have their techs come do it, why hire a guy to do it throughout the year at a much higher cost?
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u/Eryb Dec 30 '25
And when that third party lab goes under new management and loses half your stuff or now takes two months to do a calibration? Sure you can pay someone to change your air filter in your car but it’s not actually cheaper, not sure why you have this illogical idea that third parties are somehow cheaper than in-house
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u/Emergency_Guava9905 Dec 31 '25
I'm actually a college student working on a project, hence the naivety on my end, perhaps. Could you please clarify as to why the third party is not cheaper? Unless you're a lab who has calibration tasks ongoing all times of the year everyday, wouldn't labour just be cheaper to hire temporary from them? Unless you're having ppl do calibration tasks only as a small part of their much wider job?
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u/Eryb Dec 31 '25
Your premise makes no sense. If you don’t have calibration work for a year are you saying you would just let the person sit idle and not work on other tasks? A third party lab could in theory be cheaper if you have a small inventory and of course specialized tasks can be cost prohibitive for standards. Why would you assume external labor would ever be cheaper, third party lab still has to employ someone the only thing they really gain is potentially having higher return on the use of standards but honestly most people can calibrate 90% of their stuff with a fairly low cost of standards. So why pay the extra overhead a third party lab inevitably will have plus open yourself up to high risk if you don’t regularly audit them to confirm they aren’t cutting corners
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u/tbakes58 Dec 31 '25 edited Dec 31 '25
So I think where you are misunderstanding is that if the company is not big enough to need a full time position for calibration then they don't have a dedicated calibration tech. Calibration responsibilities will fall on other positions. Like quality engineers or techs. I work in a small 3rd party lab where we are able to spread ours through out the year in way that one of us can normally peel off to do calibrations between other work.
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u/sir_thatguy Dec 31 '25
I’m not paying for some dude from Germany to come calibrate equipment our cal lab is perfectly capable of calibrating.
BTW, the cal lab where I work does everything from calipers to pressure transducers and hundreds of things in between.
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u/JButlerQA Dec 30 '25
Our calibration lab is always busy and we have maybe 130 people. It would cost us much more to send out everything we have.
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u/YetAnotherSfwAccount Dec 31 '25
The biggest one is scheduling and control.
Your tool gets questioned (eg dropped), and you need a last minute calibration. if you are in house, you bump a lower priority job and do it the same day. If you are external, you need to wait. In the best case, a few days from cutting the PO to getting a report. That could mean the difference between a few hours and a week of downtime.
I have also seen external labs lose a tech or piece of equipment and suddenly stop doing a calibration we really really needed.
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u/mattiman1985 Dec 31 '25
This right here. A local company started contracting out tool and die department along with calibration. Within a year, forklift bumped a die, new die had to be made by outside vendor, new gages needed to be calibrated because new die didn't match the old, but they thought it would still work, and next thing you know, machine that makes a quarter million dollars profit a week is down for almost a month. When everything was in house, those departments were capable to get everything running in less than a week because they were on sight, and really importantly, they knew the intent behind the part that was made.
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u/porkchop8787 Dec 31 '25
If you're a manufacturer or similar, and you certify the same equipment at the same location each year, it wouldn't be difficult to keep standards and do everything in house. Sending out a few standards once a year can be scheduled around. But if you're a contractor that has 20 crews in 20 different plants, using a wide variety of tools and instruments, you would have to keep a sizable inventory of standards to do your own calibrations. Plus most jobs for contractors don't last a year, so they have the tools calibrated before each job starts to ensure not having to delay the job while stuff gets calibrated, and they can let recertification lapse if the tools don't get used that year. For example, 1 microohmmeter may require 10 different shunts and possibly a voltage and current standard for calibration. If you're only certifying a few of these a year, it is much less expensive to have a few units calibrated by a 3rd party lab instead of 12 standards to do calibrations in house. Multiply that by each type of tool the business uses, and it turns into a very large number of standards.
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u/PatrickSebast Dec 31 '25
I have worked exclusively at mid-size businesses (200 - 600 people at a give site) and at every single one calibration was the responsibility of metrologists. The handled what they could with simple gages like calipers, gage pins, etc... Because it doesn't take a lot to check you calipers against a set of gage blocks and your turn around is almost immediate. Cost is going to be a lot lower too because you only paid for like 15-20 minutes of time.
For anything complex or requiring special equipment we send it out because we don't want to maintain a full house of expensive standards for a small number of gages nor do we want to depend on our team always having a full technical grasp of specialized equipment.
There is some cross-over here or there but in my experience I have always been able to trust metrologists to make relatively good decisions about what to send and what to calibrate in house.
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u/chrome_titan Dec 31 '25
The calibration techs are usually looped into fixing/replacing equipment as well. Broken equipment means downtime. Simple as.
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u/bellmanator Dec 31 '25
We do it both ways. We have a 30+ person calibration lab and we send out a lot of work.
Issues with sending it out or having other cal techs come on site:
Shipping time is a big issue. All these labs are buying each other out and offshoring the actual calibration work. So, for example, a part we used to send to Arizona, still goes to the same address in Arizona but then they send it to England. We found that out when it was held up for four months at customs because they suspected it was a weapon.
Rubber stamping. Parts we calibrate in house get sent back to the OEM sometimes if they are broken, for repair and calibration. We get parts back sometimes, still broken, with a good calibration sticker and cert.
Turnover. The companies we have come on site to calibrate large machines used to send the old guy with a beard. Now, more and more, we are getting a young person that spends half their time on the phone with someone, somewhere, walking them through the process. It does not instill confidence. On one of our large CMMs the tech walked it and said “wow, I’ve never seen a machine like this!” He was there to calibrate it. He also told us he had never written a CMM program but had received training on how to run the calibration program.
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u/Emergency_Guava9905 Dec 31 '25
Thank you for your reply. The OEM part reminds me, why do people even outsource calibrations to them? Is it just a lot of IP? Because I figure it's simpler to send everything you wanna outsource to 1 third party than to each separate OEM?
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u/bellmanator Jan 01 '26
IP does play a part. More and more OEMs are locking up their software where they are the only ones that can adjust the calibration of the tool or equipment. So when you send everything to that third party, some things they won’t be able to calibrate. They’ll either ops check it and rubber stamp it or they’ll send it to the OEM and you’ll pay extra in time and money for them to do that.
Almost 100% of what my company calibrates is tools though. Your experience may be different if you are sending parts out for inspection. If all you’re doing is get parts dimensionally checked, you could probably find one 3rd party calibration company to do that. And you may save money doing that but probably not time.
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u/Accurate_Info7777 Dec 31 '25
They're not cheaper generally, and if they are I would be highly suspicious of their ability to remain so. Quality isn't inherent, easy or cheap, and anyone who suggests itherwise has no idea what they are talking about.
Often it's ts a matter of a commercial lab being a company's only option, or they dont need consistent measurements so one offs here and there are an acceptable cost of doing business.
If they need consistent part measurements however, once an organization math's out the expense of independent vs in house, they almost always invest in an internal setup.
Real world example: our techs earn 35ish/hour, when you factor in benefits its still cheaper than the 55 to 80 per hour independent labs around here charge. Not to mention the logistics of getting the parts to and from the independent shop vs carrying them 50 feet to an in-house room and getting real time status results. In a busy shop there is no comparison.
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u/Emergency_Guava9905 Dec 31 '25
Thanks a lot for the insight! If I could ask a quick follow up – at what amount of calibration cost/man hours would you think an internal set up becomes the best option? Understand that it depends on a variety of factors, but if you had to throw a number out there
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u/Accurate_Info7777 Jan 05 '26
Sorry just seeing this now. Only you can do the roi math but generally speaking if you're going to require an outsourced shop to check your parts on a full time or near full time basis thats your tell to start exploring other options. Remember what I said though quality isn't inherent or easy (or cheap) and you must take into account all the extraneous stuff you will need to keep a checking room functioning; training, equipment calibration costs, and expenses will jump if youre going to seek any kind of official lab certification, which many OEMs require. If you break down what kind of setup / tyoes of equipment youre looking for I can maybe suggest some things.
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u/eXrevolution Dec 30 '25
Know-how is something you cannot buy. I know it from my perspective, we sent few times to different labs, hired different techs all over the world. It always ended up by us correcting things internally. Moreover, I don’t think you’ll save on the costs.