Inspectra, the Marsa-based component inspection company, has become the first local firm to obtain ISO17025 accreditation for its weighing scales calibration facility.
The company has also just unveiled a €250,000 ‘clean room’ within its plant to win outsourced business from the pharmaceuticals, medical and high-tech sectors.
Managing director Alfred Camilleri and director Joseph Caruana, both of whom are engineers, told The Sunday Times that Inspectra’s recent twin achievements fall under a business plan to broaden its portfolio of ancillary services to industry, particularly to the life sciences field.
“We identified a considerable business opportunity for the calibration of weighing scales,” Mr Camilleri explained. “There are 29 pharmaceutical plants in Malta which all require this service in one way or another. To date no other company in Malta provides an accredited service.
“All weighing balances for legal metrology are required by law to be calibrated by an ISO 17025-accredited laboratory. Malta has been a little slow in taking this requirement up, but the Malta Standards Authority has made it mandatory recently.”
Inspectra is able to calibrate a wide range of industrial and commercial weighing equipment that is required to be highly accurate. Potential customers include pharmaceutical companies, goldsmiths, and fresh produce brokers.
The facility means highly specialised industries will be able to have weighing equipment calibrated locally and avoid having to ship it overseas.
Meanwhile, the clean room, partly funded under a European research and development grant scheme, allows Inspectra to offer a service to a new range of potential clients in the pharmaceutical and medical sector.
The facility would be attractive to clients requiring an industry-standard faultless environment in which to carry out sorting, repackaging, or product development of highly sensitive goods.
Mr Camilleri explained that Inspectra had chosen to channel investment into such a facility after it was encouraged by the government’s aspirations for Malta to offer increased highly sophisticated services in the life sciences sphere.
Both the weighing scales’ calibration accreditation and the clean room were the result of Inspectra’s foresight as it was aware its core inspection business had a potentially limited lifespan.
Inspectra was Mr Caruana’s brainchild. In a previous role, Mr Caruana was responsible for carrying out quality certification within organisations, but he recognised companies inevitably had an Achilles heel.
He met Mr Camilleri while delivering a course on quality certification and shared the potential business opportunity with him. Inspectra was set up six months later in 2005.
“Sorting out defects does not add value to business operations,” Mr Caruana said. “We identified the opportunity to provide visual inspection and sorting for other companies. Our aim has been to convert any company’s overhead costs into variable costs that are manageable.”
Inspectra’s client portfolio now includes most of Malta’s largest plants in the electronics, pharmaceutical and automotive industries and more than 20 overseas clients from the UK, Italy, Singapore, and a growing number of customers from China.
More than 220 inspectors are divided into cells to manually inspect materials like unfinished manufactured components and automotive parts; a few score staff is regularly detailed to carry out inspection work at clients’ plants. Many of the inspectors are women who are able to work flexible hours at a highly labour intensive task.
As part of the supply chain, Inspectra takes delivery of goods and then relays them to a third party in Malta or in Europe on behalf of its clients. The end-of-line process carried out in Malta has the full confidence of clients which seek inspection and accreditation for parts in a European Union member state.
Inspectra fits the bill as Malta is ideally placed as a low-cost, high-tech destination for this service, although the directors are mindful the local business scenario in this sector will change in years to come.
Inspectra is now busy marketing its new business-to-business offerings and is working to identify potential clients.