Customer Profile

Edelbrock

It began in 1938, in a modest four-car repair shop in Los Angeles. Today, the Edelbrock name is known around the world for high-quality performance automotive components.

Manufacturing a wide range of high precision, high performance engine components is a complicated and challenging business. Muscle car enthusiasts, hot rod owners, and racing professionals are a demanding group that doesn’t take quality or performance lightly. The Edelbrock team knows this well and keeps delivering year after year.

Ensuring that high performance parts are manufactured to proper specifications takes a lot of measurements. Peter Hatch, Edelbrock’s chief calibration technician, is responsible for ensuring that the company’s hundreds of gages, fixtures, and pieces of test equipment are properly managed, tracked, and calibrated. He chose the GAGEtrak Calibration Management System from CyberMetrics to manage the thousands of calibration records generated each year. Hatch estimates that he “saves 50% and probably more” time using GAGEtrak. “It would take at least two people to do my job were it not for GAGEtrak,” he maintains.

As a QS-9000 certified company, Edelbrock needs a system that it knows passes the scrutiny of tough QS-9000 auditors. Hatch is very pleased that his last audit revealed “no problems at all” and his ability to instantly recall any gage, calibration, or gage R&R record makes his
job so much easier when working with auditors. He especially likes showing the auditors the security feature of GAGEtrak, which allows him to give other users read-only rights, without the risk of having them modify his records. Hatch likes the Audit Trail function for tracking record changes, but wishes that it would track even more details. (This will be available in the new release slated for early 2002.)

Opting not to take the available training classes, Hatch managed to learn and use GAGEtrak even as an admitted “real computer novice” when he started. “I received excellent and very patient support from everyone at CyberMetrics,” he says, whenever he contacted support technicians for help.

In addition to its ease of use and audit capabilities, Hatch appreciates GAGEtrak’s ability to easily generate calibration recall reports. “They are filtered by employee so each person only gets a list of gages they’re responsible for,” he explains. Another plus to the program is its Gage Crib feature. This feature tracks each and every measurement and testing item and stores information about the equipment in a variety of information fields. If a gage is overdue for calibration, for example, the system automatically warns the operator to prevent using an out-of-calibration gage. The system also provides quantitative data for justifying purchases of new equipment and it ensures gage /product traceability. If a gage is found to be defective, it is very easy to recall a list of jobs that the gage was used on. CyberMetrics offers several optional applications with GAGEtrak. Among them is the GAGEtrak Calibration Label Kit, which Edelbrock chose. It includes a special laminated label printer, connecting cables, software drivers, and label design utility. Hatch considers this a major benefit. He says, “I hate handwriting labels and this saves me a lot of time—I use it for labeling everything!”
While Edelbrock uses the standard desktop version of GAGEtrak, as it best serves its needs, GAGEtrak is also available in a client/server edition for supporting MS SQL Server databases.

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