Frequently Asked Questions
National Calibration Inc. (NCI) strives to provide our customers with answers to their common questions. Select questions below to see their answers.
NCI's regular hours are Monday-Friday 8am-5pm (refer to
Locations for time-zones).
Observing the standard U.S. holidays: New Years Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day and day after and Christmas Day.
On-Site calibration downtime is the most efficient, your equipment will only be out of service during the short time our technician is on-site.
For equipment in our labs, NCI's standard turnaround time is 5-7 business days.
To coordinate a shorter turnaround, call us (phone numbers at bottom of page), or talk with our receiving department when you drop off your equipment.
Yes, both Fed-Ex and UPS have multiple stops at NCI each day.
Yes, please visit NCI's
On-Site page and select the "Detailed On-Site Checklist" link.
If the equipment is broken, NCI will communicate additional labor and parts costs and get your approval to continue, or return as is.
If NCI finds a need to subcontract the calibration of your item(s), again we will communicate with you and get your approval, or return it to you.
For each item NCI calibrates, a certificate is delivered with the item or emailed to the customer, and a sticker is attached to the item with barcode and serial number.
"ISO 8402:1994 Quality management and quality assurance - Vocabulary": The ability to trace the history, application or location of an entity by means of recorded identifications.
"ISO 9000:2000 Quality Management Systems. Fundamentals and Vocabulary": The ability to trace the history, application or location of that which is under consideration.
For both these definitions, there is an additional clause which states that when relating to products, traceability specifically entails "the origin of materials and parts, the processing history, and the distribution and location of the product after delivery." Note that in the 2000 definition "recorded identifications" are no longer mentioned, which means that, according to ISO 8402, objective methods or instruments which give immediate values for entity properties (for food items, for instance devices that measure fat, water content, color, salinity, etc.) do not provide traceability, where as according to ISO 9000 they do. For the food industry, the older and more specific definition is the most applicable, and the objective methods and instruments are considered to provide traceability control mechanisms rather than traceability as such, and they are used to verify the claims made in the recorded identifications.
The science of measurement. Metrology includes all theoretical and practical aspects of measurement.
In metrology, measurement uncertainty is a non-negative parameter characterizing the dispersion of the values attributed to a measured quantity. The uncertainty has a probabilistic basis and reflects incomplete knowledge of the quantity.
This is a parameter that is used to state the quality of a measurement. Because no measuring instrument is 100% accurate, scientists and researchers use measurement uncertainty to express the distribution of errors associated with a measurement.
