When you think about equipment that is used for measuring and test activities, you think about important equipment that is used to pass or fail product but may not necessarily see its correlation with a supply chain. However, this very equipment—whether it is calibrated in-house or off-site—does involve a supply chain one way or the other and therefore adherence to suppliers and supply-chain requirements is imperative.

If you outsource your calibration, you know that your calibration partners are your vendors. But when equipment is calibrated in-house, you may think there are no suppliers involved. However, even in this case, you probably still have to send the standard used for calibration to an outside calibration company that can provide traceability to National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standards. So whether the calibration is done in-house or by an external company, calibration requires a thorough look into purchasing procedures and the supply chain.

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