Did I get you all there? I could hear the collective groan from my offices here in the Isle of Wight!
No, thanks to our technical expertise, listening to our customers and providing fast delivery, at the right prices, here at LCM Systems we have not been affected by the recession and our business continues to grow. However, it wouldn’t be me if I didn’t have a current hobby horse about how in the fight for business and reducing overheads and prices, it is the customers who are getting short-changed.
My latest gripe is with inadequate testing of load cells before they are dispatched. From talking to customers and other load cell manufacturers and distributors, it appears that, in a bid to save money, the quality of many products is being compromised due to them either not being tested at all, batch tested (so only a certain number are tested, not the whole batch) or the sensors are not tested to their maximum capacity. An example I heard recently was that a company supplied a 500t load cell that failed, only for the customer to find out that the supplier had only tested the product to 200-300t, as that was all they were able to do in-house and were not prepared to pay for external testing! Bearing in mind that many of these large capacity load cells are used in critical applications and failure could be catastrophic!
So, make sure your load cells are 100% tested, calibrated and traceable. You can rest assured that these happens with all load cells you but from LCM and they are all traceable to UKAS – The United Kingdom Accreditation Service.
