Maintaining Quality in a Global Calibration Partner Program

System downtime is so critical that most customers are as sensitive to turnaround time as they are price when it comes to equipment service. This requires companies to consider the best way to implement local service offerings if they expect to compete in the global instrument market. The cost to create local solutions often leads to an attempt at centralized, regional, services to control expense while gaining market share. This solution typically works within a country, but suffers significant drawbacks when equipment is shipped across borders. Facing this problem, National Instruments (NI) Calibration Services grows its global service program through a combination of NI owned facilities and partnering with local and regional laboratories. This paper explores the challenges and solutions in growing a global services organization that leverages partners. Solving partner training, ensuring technical quality, and managing logistics are all part of creating a successful global footprint. These topics and a discussion of import/export requirements highlighting the challenges of logistics is reviewed.