The Instrument Maintenance & Calibration System (IMCS Pro) , is a laboratory equipment calibration tracking and management software program that allows you to schedule, track and report inspections on your instruments. IMCS Pro was specifically designed for automating equipment calibration and tracking instrument history. In IMCS Pro, the term "instrument history" refers to information regarding the type and identification of the instrument, where it is and who’s using it, what problems are ongoing with the instrument, as well as what problems have occurred in the past and how they were corrected. IMCS Pro allows you to schedule periodic maintenance and inspection events, and to keep track of when they were done and what the outcome was. The program comes with an extensive array of reports, and allows you to create your own reports with the Report Wizard.

In short, IMCS Pro is a fast, easy-to-use, and comprehensive solution to a pressing need: the ability to maintain long term, organized, and readily accessible maintenance history on laboratory instruments and other types of equipment.

The idea behind IMCS Pro is quite simple – provide a very easy to use equipment tracking program. To achieve this, IMCS Pro uses an interface that incorporates a sortable listing of equipment along with the detailed information in the index cards below the listing. You can resort this list just by clicking on any column header. You can limit the equipment displayed in the list to a certain type of equipment, or a particular department, or by whether the equipment is In Use or not, as well as a variety of other criteria.

The List View is sortable by Equipment Type, Vendor, Department, Assembly/Component, or None. Use the None view option to sort your database by a specific index in the IMCS Pro table structure.

"The Detail Cards", which are a series of index cards showing all the detailed information known about the instrument. There are Six cards: Status (for identification and location), Vendor (for purchase information), Service (for warranty and other service contract information), Problem (for logging problem information), Scheduling (for generating scheduled events), and Tasks (for logging information on tasks completed).

IMCS Pro was designed by people who use laboratory instruments for people who use them. The interface was designed to be very easy to use for the novice, but still packed with features and power for the expert. For example, notice that button that says "Jan 1" (it looks like a calendar)? Anywhere you need a date to be entered, you can click a button and up pops a multi-year calendar, just select a date and click OK! And the little "+" buttons allow you to quickly add new Departments and Equipment Types on the fly.

The Problems and Scheduling tabs are really the heart of IMCS Pro. The problem tab is used for keeping track of equipment trouble. When a problem occurs, the user enters the date and their name and department, and then a description of the problem (which can be quite long if needed). You can generate reports and work orders that show problems which are "Open". When the problem is corrected, the Resolution tab is filled out (see below), and the problem is marked "Resolved". In this way, problems never get lost, and the solutions are always available for the next time!

As you can see, there is a lot of power packed in to an intuitive screen layout. IMCS Pro uses the Custom Report Wizard for reporting, and comes with a wide variety of reports for listing equipment by type, department, status, or ID#; for printing work orders; for listing vendors, and for showing open problems or due events.

The Maintenance tab is where you schedule events. In IMCS Pro, an event is some operation you intentionally want to perform, perhaps at some time in the future. Instead of having to remember it, you tell IMCS Pro about it, and when you want it to occur. Then IMCS Pro notifies you when the event becomes "due". IMCS Pro is really good at scheduling events. For example, what if you need to do a Preventative Maintenance operation on some instrument, every week? You can tell IMCS Pro when the first due date is, and then to schedule it weekly, and IMCS Pro will do it automatically!

You have a wide variety of options for how often to schedule an event, from once, to daily, to semi-annually, and just about anything in between. You can also set the maximum number of times to perform the event, and optionally run some other application for maintaining external data (like an excel spreadsheet with calibration records).

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