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moldmakingtechnology.com 19 FOR MORE INFORMATION: Apex Supply Chain Technologies / 800-229-7912 / apexsupplychain.com Oakley Die & Mold / 513-754-8500 / odm.com Of course, not all calibration follows a set schedule. That's why, upon returning a tool, employees are required to enter a number designating its condition. Entering "3" indicates damage; "2" indicates the need for calibration; and "1" indi- cates that a tool is performing well and ready for re-use. In either of the first two cases, the system issues an alert to management and locks the designated compartment down, thereby preventing anyone else from using the tool until the problem can be addressed. Meanwhile, Trajectory Cloud's com- prehensive records of every tool's usage and calibration history have proven critical to meeting ISO documentation requirements, Goddard says. "We can pull up a usage report for any tool and find out the number of hours it was checked out, down to the second, by whom and for what job," he says. This is particularly useful when customers require audit trails for their own quality compliance, a scenario that's particularly common in medical work. Such information is also useful for proving that a given tool hasn't been removed from the locker within its specified calibration interval. That's a common scenario for duplicate copies of instruments used so frequently that they rarely leave the floor, Beltz says. Rather than undergoing calibration anyway, as they would have in the past, these dupli- cate tools can simply be re-certified. In fact, ensuring that tools are calibrated only when they actually need it has saved the shop approximately $10,000 since the first locker was installed less than a year ago, Goddard says. Although other savings are more dif- ficult to quantify, he emphasizes that they are no less important. Without Axcess and Trajectory Cloud, he explains, Oakley likely would have instituted a manual, labor-intensive system for providing more robust docu- mentation and managing calibration schedules. He estimates that the cost of such a system—which likely would have been passed on to customers—would have been on par with an additional salaried employee. The Axcess lockers not only provide a more cost-effective means to the same end, but also helps ensure all tools are available when needed. "We have 100 percent accountability and traceability for all 52 of our mea- suring tools, 24 hours a day," Goddard concludes.