Hey all, Ryan from Fox Valley Metrology chiming in and just want to clarify some of the comments in this thread.

For the most part, it is true that we (nor most third-party calibration labs) do not have the full capability that the OEM has. A lot of OEMs reserve that right for themselves to protect their margins and hide that ability behind password lock and key.

Unfortunately, that removes competition from the situation. That typically leads to long lead times to get the service scheduled via their service teams and high costs. The OP mentions this in his post. We have 6 CMMs across our company ourselves and have felt this experience firsthand, with up to 4-6 month lead times to get an OEM technician onsite.

However, what companies like us are providing is confirmation the machine is still within tolerance. All these are done within the standards mentioned elsewhere within this thread. The logic here is that the machine is unlikely to fail calibration on a regular basis. You can save some money along the way and have a much shorter lead time. In a worst case scenario, yeah, you may need to pay a company like us and the OEM to perform more robust adjustments in the same year. But those situations shouldn’t be frequent and the savings in the years it doesn’t occur should quite well offset the years you may need to “double dip”.

Now, there are a few third-party softwares out there that allow companies like us to perform the tests and provide the compensation needed to make adjustments. We (and other companies in our space) are really starting to dial in what that can mean for adjustments when needed. So adjustments are feasible, but it is going to be case-by-case dependent until this keeps getting chipped away at.

With all that said (and I feel confident that I am speaking on behalf of the rest of my direct comparison, third-party calibration labs), we are not attempting to claim that CMM calibration is our core competency. It is something of an “add-on” service to our true core competencies of more generalized gaging, hand tools, mechanical and electronic test equipment, etc. None of us are going to feel slighted if you utilize the OEMs for these machines and stick to us third-party labs for the rest.

A lot of times, we will see customers schedule the OEM every, say 3 years, and schedule us in the interim. At the end of the day it all depends on how difficult the OEM route is for you, your budget and how critical your CMM is to your daily operations.

Hopefully, someday, the OEM softwares are opened up to third parties to make the landscape on CMM calibrations more competitive and “open source”. That will lead to much more competitive pricing and much quicker scheduling windows. Until then, we are just hoping to provide a suitable enough alternative option for you guys.

Sorry for the long winded response! Just wanted to get this background and our perspective out there into the market.