Joshua Obar’s official title is Business Development Manager/Partner at Global Instrumentation Services. But his day-to-day reality is a bit different than what his title implies.
“When you own a small business you do everything.”
As he tells it, “I have 500 hats, including taking out the trash and billing. When you own a small business you do everything. When you work for a big corporation you don’t think about who empties the trash, you never think about who pays the light bill…I do, because I’m the one who does it all. Or my partner. Either one of us does it.”
Global Instrumentation Services (GIS), located in Houston, Texas, specializes in providing accredited on-site calibrations for a variety of industries throughout North America. GIS can set up and manage an entire calibration system for a customer. They also help labs attain compliance with ISO 17025.
Josh is one of the company’s founders along with partner Gavin Lewis; they have five employees. It’s a small company with big goals.
“We calibrate pressure, temperature – that’s how we utilize Fluke’s testing equipment. We measure force on different types of equipment, whether it’s universal testing machines or mill flow indexers, capillariometers, and we go all the way down to simple hand tools. We’re that one stop shop for quality labs. We have the ability to come in and, from the easy stuff all the way up to the analytical equipment, we can calibrate it.”
“We’re that one stop shop for quality labs.”
GIS specializes in calibrations within the process industries. “They’re making plastic pellets, or they’re compounding plastics,” explains Josh, “Some of our customers are making hoses, some are making products but a lot of them are making the raw material.”
Josh is quick to point out the importance of calibrating all the way through the production process, starting early on. “With all plastics, they have a certain melting point and that melting point allows them to be processed. If the temperature is off and they go to process that material, it might not melt properly, it might over-melt and burn, it might lose properties that they’re looking for in their final product. So all these things are determined by making sure that the testing equipment has been calibrated properly and to the proper standards.”
What about calibrating pressure? Josh says, “You’re looking at pressure or impact strength or something along those lines…how strong they are, how well they bend. Universal testing machines will take a sample and they’ll bend that sample to see the bend strength. Impact testers see how they’ll take a certain weight or load impacting into it. All those things have to be calibrated so they’re very precise. They can utilize those numbers to look at products and say, we can build this and it’s going to have this strength, it’s going to have this bend force, it’s going to be able to withstand this.”
“There’s testing for almost everything you can possibly think of.”
“There’s testing for almost everything you can possibly think of,” he adds. “Whether it’s weather, whether it’s impact strength, how it’s going to react to salt and sun and different changes in temperature, whether you use it here in Houston or in Alaska. All of these things are determined in the testing.”
With his many customer interactions, Josh has seen a rise in the general knowledge of calibration and how important it is. “I think 10, 20 years ago it wasn’t really thought of. They thought that all it entailed was a report and a sticker. Don’t get me wrong, there were people who knew exactly how important it was. But I think at a laboratory level people just thought, I need to get this so when I get an audit I can pass my audit.”
“Lab managers are really starting to know what calibration is and how important it is to their products.”
“Now we’re finding that the lab managers are really starting to know what calibration is and how important it is to their products.”
That being said, “No one wants to read an ISO standard. But now it’s becoming the norm that you have to know those standards inside and out. You have to know exactly what’s written in that standard. And when we go out to calibrate equipment we make sure we bring it to that standard.”
Josh notes that “a lot of our issues that come about are via audits. You’ll have an auditor come in and say, you need to get this, this and this done. Potential customers call us and say, can you do this? And I’ll say yeah, we actually work on that. “
“Sometimes it’s something that we’ve never done, or it’s a European company, they don’t know anybody in the States and we’re trying to figure it out on the fly. We had one customer that had a tear tester that pulls apart plastic and they had to fly someone in from Germany every year. They asked me, can you do this? I said well I’ve never seen it, let me take a look at it. And I look at it and I say, well, one thing we’ve got to calibrate is temperature. Another thing we have to calibrate is load. And I said oh, is there a plate that goes on here, and they said how do you know there’s a plate? And I said, there are two indentations right here, something’s got to go in it.”
“Our job every day is to accomplish something at somebody else’s facility.”
“It’s just like that, that lateral thinking on how to solve a problem. When you’re in an office job you can sit back and hide in your office. Our job every day is to accomplish something at somebody else’s facility.”
Josh believes that Fluke Calibration has helped GIS to grow and prosper. “Fluke Calibration has brought our small calibration business to a level of quality only obtained by the big boys with deep pockets. Thank you for helping us compete on a level that we only dreamed of and now is reality!”
“You’re getting those experiences and you’re living those experiences.”
Josh turns thoughtful when asked what he likes most about his work. “I like going out onto a job and solving a problem. I love fixing equipment. And I love the “atta boys.” But more than anything, what really intrigues me about the business that we’re in is, every day it’s different. Every day we’re meeting very interesting people. It really opens your mind to the way people think, how things progress, whether it’s in a laboratory environment or it’s just in everyday life.”
“Especially with calibration, everything seems to be a fire drill – you have to get it all done yesterday. That’s one of the things I like. I like the “functioning chaos” because functioning and chaos are exactly what service work and calibration is. People who aren’t in the industry have no idea what it’s like. I’m constantly shooting from the hip and have 15 things in the air juggling them.”
“You’re getting those experiences and you’re living those experiences. You have customers who you see year after year and you ask how are the kids and they talk about their kids and their families. And you feel like you’re part of their life.”
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