Virtually every manufacturer must perform some kind of testing or inspection to ensure their products meet their own internal quality standards, governmental requirements or the standards their customers set. A growing number of industries use some form of nondestructive testing (NDT) to ensure that structural and mechanical components perform their function in a safe, reliable, and cost-effective manner. Given that NDT doesn’t alter the article being inspected, it can save both money and time in product evaluation, troubleshooting, and research. Although there are a wide variety of NDT methods, some of the most common ones include ultrasonic testing, visual and optical testing, magnetic particle testing, penetrant testing, eddy current testing, and low coherence interferometry. Digital radiography, including computed tomography and metrology, has become a particularly popular choice because of the advantages it offers over traditional X-rays, including greater time efficiency through eliminating chemical processing, the ability to transfer and enhance images digitally, and the lower level of radiation required. Once the most appropriate form of NDT is determined for a particular application, a manufacturer must decide whether to perform these inspections in-house with an existing system or to purchase a new system, which can represent a major investment for any company. The other option is to farm them out to a third-party inspection service.
In order for a manufacturing operation to make that buy-equipment vs. buy-services decision intelligently, management needs to answer a number of important questions. For the purposes of illustration, we will use digital radiography equipment as an example to examine these questions.