Common Challenges in Metrology

Metrology is a technologically intense and expensive business.

Common challenges include the following:

  • Measurement standards require proper laboratory space and functioning environmental controls. Development partners are willing to provide equipment, but sometimes the recipient country has to provide the space and environmental controls. Mobilising the country contribution can be a real challenge.
  • A key issue is the choice of national measurement standards and their accuracy class. Knowledge regarding the needs of industry, testing laboratories and the public sector are extremely important in guiding such decisions. It is of no use if the national measurement standard is of a lesser accuracy than what industry requires.
  • The opposite to the above is also a real challenge, namely the over-specification of measurement equipment (either by the recipient organisation or the supplier) far above the needs of the economy or the realistic ability of the NMI to operate. Over-specification has a series of disadvantages: (i) The equipment is much more expensive and more difficult to maintain; (ii) much more demanding laboratory environmental requirements are needed; (iii) the equipment needs much higher expertise to operate at its full potential; (iv) because there is no need, the equipment is never used and no expertise is built up, and (v) operating at the low uncertainties requires very careful metrology to deal with the influence factors.
  • Measurement standards need to be properly maintained and have to be periodically calibrated or compared through regional and/or international comparisons. Custom procedures are frequently a major issue in moving such instruments from one country to another. Sometimes sending equipment under personal supervision of a metrologist is the only means of doing so.
  • Routine calibration for industry is a service that the private sector often can provide more efficiently than any public calibration laboratory, provided there is sufficient demand. The metrology system policy and legislation should therefore make space for such private sector laboratories to be established. As long as they are appropriately accredited to ISO/IEC 17025 and their working standards traceably calibrated to the national standards, they should be fully recognised by the authorities.
  • Larger companies may establish their own in-house metrology laboratories. The same requirements for accreditation to ISO/IEC 17025 would apply to them as well, if authorities are to accept their results.