I have been in calibration labs all over the country, in all kinds of labs, 3rd party labs, In-house labs, Manufacturers Labs, and rental companies. I would like to say I have seen it all, but from time to time I get surprised.
The problem with paying calibration tech big money, is few of them, can produce big. The bottom line is a company has to make money or save money; so a technician has to bill more than he cost the company. And his cost is not just his salary you have to add in social security, insurance and other benefits, buying standards, calibrating standards, computers software, facility costs and utilities. This all adds up to some pretty big numbers.
So companies have to make money, I have seen many companies use a 4to1 ration to estimate if a technician is able to make money. Meaning the technician has to be able to bill 4 time what you pay him; so a 50k per year tech has to bill/save 200k per year to break even. And a 100k tech would have to bill 400k per year. You can tech this ratio by looking at you bill rate compared to you average technicians hourly rate.
Last year looked at a report put out by one my larger customers. Their average technician was billing 240k per year, and their techs made an average 55k per year.
So there are the problems as I see it..
1) The average tech in LA has no productivity advantage over the average tech in Kansas. Thought the cost of living in Los Angelis, Dallas, San Francisco is higher, the cost of calibration is not. Matter of fact the average cost of calibration is LA is lower. And, yes many companies are doing little more than printing paper.
2) Companies that automate do get more production out of each technician, but the cost of automation cost the company and raises the 4-to1 ration to say 5-to1.
3) And I hate to say it, but many of the techs and management I see on the road are very inefficient. I was at a customers site a few weeks back and watch a tech spent an hour getting all the standards relocated to his station to-do a calibration. It is took him about an hour to but all the standards back. If this is a high production facility, well they just lost 2 hours of billing time.
4) Dont get me wrong, I love automation. But, I watch technicians site there and watch our software run. We give them a connection message and run all the test that use that connection; so they may have 15-40 minutes before they have to do anything, and they just sit there.
So if we as calibrators want to start putting more money in our pockets, we need to start making some changes.
The first major change we need to make is this antiquated 1 technician, 1 name on the calibration certification and 1 tech number on the label quality system paradigm.
Instruments today are multi-functional, a tech should not have to move standards around to calibrate it.. We should move the UUTs to the station with the standards and let the technician who works that station do that part of the calibration. (and be able to track who did what and when)
**Imagine if Ford, had each employee build one car start to finish, rearranging the plant as needed.