I am looking for any information available on SAP usage in a calibration lab.
Sorry for my ignorance but what is SAP?
I know it's slang for a blackjack but that's probably not it.
SAP is software that pretty much consolidates the different aspects of a corporation's process, often incorporating existing software. It allows matrices to be generated covering all areas of an organization. It ensures steps are not bypassed if it affects efficiency or quality. It can also be used to eliminate redundacies.
I haven't heard of a calibration module, SAP is currently being implented (takes over a year) into my facility and we changed to new calibration/asset management software at the same time, non-SAP.
SAP has an inspection module that they would have you believe meets the requirements for a calibration package.
I used to work at a manufacturing plant where we had a Material Requirements Planning, MRP, system that had a module in it for service and calibration but it didn't meet any of the actual requirements for metrology applications. Ours wasn't SAP but they are all cut from the same cloth, they don't understand the requirements for traceability etc and it was a little cumbersome to use. I would stick with some actual metrology management software, like Blue Mountain etc. Not plugging any particular brand here but at least they are specifically designed for metrology applications.
I am so far behind on my posting... when I worked for Motorola a number of years ago, they tried to get us to adopt SAP as our calibration recall database. We even had a conference call with an SAP sales engineer (or some such title).
We did not feel as though it was an adequate database tool for a good comprehensive calibration lab. I am not bad mouthing SAP in general - as it is a very powerful database package. The other thing was it was going to cost us about $300K for the implementation. We decided we didn't want it.
Does Blue Mountain give you the ability to print calibration certificates?
http://www.coolblue.com/Products/Calibration_Manager
I never used Blue Mountain Personally, I'm not advocating one way or the other just through that out as an example, SAP is expensive and not metrology purposeful.