Investment Drives Instrument Service Business

As Technical Director of environmental instrumentation specialist Quantitech (UK), Jim Monaghan is acutely aware of the level and range of resources that are necessary to be able to deliver an effective instrumentation maintenance and calibration service. “Most of the company’s service work is preventative maintenance,” he says. “We provide long-term service contracts that maximise instrument ‘up-time’ and in order to achieve this, it is necessary to invest heavily in staff, training, spares and consumables, as well as spare instruments and a hire fleet.”

The company’s instruments include continuous emissions or process monitors as well as laboratory, portable and field-use analysers. This equipment is often essential for the operation of industrial processes, so when a continuous gas analyser, for example, has to be taken off-line for service and/or calibration, a temporary replacement analyser is essential. In a recent example, a continuous gas analyser at an incinerator was damaged during routine maintenance, so an urgent call was made to Quantitech. An engineer was on-site with rented transportable analysers almost immediately and the portable analysers were operational within an hour and a half of his arrival. As a result, it was not necessary to close the entire plant pending the arrival of new parts. In this instance, it was fortunate that a Gasmet FTIR analyser was available from the hire fleet, but Jim says: “Many of our customers buy a portable FTIR as back-up for their continuous FTIR emissions monitors. With long-term service contracts, they rarely need them, but these customers sleep more comfortably in the knowledge that their entire process would not have to stop if the analyser suffered from any problems.”

One of the advantages of long-term service contracts is that it becomes possible to prepare planned service schedules and to stock appropriate spares and consumables so that a quick response is possible to any unforeseen issues as well as scheduled maintenance and calibration. In addition, remote diagnostic capability enables Quantitech’s engineers to check the health status of analysers from their offices in Milton Keynes. This lowers costs and improves the speed and efficiency with which any problems are detected and resolved.

Naturally, the provision of a high quality service in a sector that necessitates advanced levels of technical ability means that Quantitech’s engineers all possess many years of relevant experience. In addition, the company works very closely with manufacturers to support the UK service business and to train the service team.