An MCM officer verifying the accuracy of a spring balance.
HAVING benefited from a strong industrial support network in legal metrology when it started, today the Metrology Corporation Malaysia Sdn Bhd (MCM) is more determined to continuously excel and enhance the services through digitalisation to cope with the needs and trending.
Legal metrology is a legal requirement in which all weights, measures and instruments for weighing and measuring for use for trade are subjected to legal verification and re-verification, stamping and registration, as stipulated in the Weights and Measures Act 1972.
If everyone can agree that metrology contributes towards a natural and vital part of our everyday life, then it is the same saying that legal metrology could protect everyone in our everyday life.
The need for fairness and justice, be it in monetary or other commercial transactions, should be justified by a legalised and credible measurement through legally controlled methods and measuring instruments.
MCM stands to champion the needs in legal metrology ever since it was awarded a fifteen-year concession for verification services by the Government in 2005.
It was incorporated primarily to undertake the implementation of the privatisation project under the scope of a privatisation scheme.
MCM has extended the services through a five-year contract awarded in April 2020 and managed to continuously surpass the annual minimum royalty guarantee set by the Government.
A petrol pump dispenser being verified by an MCM offcer.
Apart from an increase in the number of weighing and measuring instruments verified and re-verified, the company has further improved the level of service provided.
With waiting time having been reduced significantly, the company had benefited owners of weighing and measuring instruments as well as the repairers.
For the record, MCM has verified more than seven million weighing and measuring instruments since day one in operations.
Coupled with 190 verification officers from 34 branches all over Malaysia, more than 15 thousands units of test standards and equipment, logistic capabilities of 21 lorry-cranes and 13 4WD vehicles, MCM is ever ready to deliver verification and re-verification tasks at the best of service.
Addition to these facilities, MCM has developed an IT system integrating its entire verification works, including a systematically industrial database.
The system is enhanced, improvised and upgraded from time to time according to industry current and future needs.
Proudly having a solid 17 years of verification experience, MCM remains its primary objectives of promoting fair trade, consumer protection and harmonisation with international measurement standards and practices.
Strategically with the experience and achievements, MCM received the OIML CEEMS 2017 - 9th award in Hamburg, Germany which recognises the success of a unique model of public-private collaboration that produces an effective national metrology system covering legislation, reliability, enforcement and verification of trade and public transactions.
The collaboration consists of the Ministry of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs (KPDNHEP), National Metrology Institute Malaysia (NMIM) and MCM has contributed to improvements in fair trade, consumer protection and fraud eradication in Malaysia.
MCM is also the proud owner of ISO/IEC 17025: 2017 SAMM Mass Laboratory, accredited certification issued by the Department of Standard Malaysia.
Hence, any metrology-related works undertaken by MCM are fully recognised.
On top of the laboratory accreditation, MCM was also granted by the Department of Standard Malaysia for the ISO/IEC 17020: 2016 MIBAS Inspection Body: Certification of Accredited Inspection Body in inspection of weighing and measuring instruments.
MCM has been anticipating digitalisation initiatives for the last eight years.
In 2015, MCM started using QR coding (Software as a Service model–SaaS) on verification stickers for verifying certain categories of measurement instruments.
This is evident that MCM had started to use cloud computing as part of legal metrology digitalisation.
MCM had also initiated research and development collaborations with local public and private universities, to develop digital and robotic test equipment, to provide options over conservative standard testing sets (mass and volume).
Objectives of these initiatives are always within the lines of legal metrology’s main objective, which is to ensure fair trade is upheld when concerning measuring instruments.
Digitalisation can offer better accuracy and correct results as it reduces or eliminates human errors.
It can also provide quicker testing time as well as being energy saving and environmentally friendly.
MCM full-heartedly welcomes the Metrology Day 2022 theme ‘Metrology in the Digital Era’.
