What are Consultancy Services?
Sometimes knowing that you need material testing isn’t the same as knowing what tests you need, what a cohesive plan for integrating material testing into your manufacturing process might look like, or how to interpret the data you’re getting back. Covalent’s metrology consulting services enable you to integrate Covalent and our expertise into your team, collaborating to design and develop solutions tailored to your product and process.
Why Consultancy Services are Important
Material testing and metrology services can be complex, and at Covalent, we understand that most companies are focused on delivering products and services that their customers need – not becoming experts at the finer points of material science. That’s where we come in. Additionally, while any given problem may be complex, it doesn’t always make sense for each company to fully staff and supply an analytical testing laboratory.
Our consultancy services allow you to have the best of both worlds – PhDs with expertise in the material testing and metrology space and world-class laboratory based domestically in Sunnyvale, CA, that integrates seamlessly with your R&D, supply chain, manufacturing or regulatory departments.
We help clients:
- Test designs for new materials.
- Design test programs and select appropriate evaluation methods.
- Interpret results of material analysis.
- Design programs to evaluate standards compliance, or satisfy other regulatory or audit requirements.
- Perform new or ongoing supplier evaluation and benchmarking.
- Troubleshoot material failures.
When Do You Need Consultancy Services?
The need to engage scientific or metrology consultancy services often arises due to evolving challenges and goals across R&D, compliance, and production. Use cases include but aren’t limited to:
- Introduction of new materials, products, or technologies.
- Shifts in regulatory standards requiring expert interpretation.
- Need for improved testing strategies or process optimization.
- Adoption of new instrumentation or analytical platforms.
- Inconsistent results or unresolved technical issues.
- Entry into new markets with unfamiliar compliance needs.
- Identification of unknown materials or unexpected results.
- Client-specific requirements for documentation, reporting, or audits.
At Covalent, we find that customers get the most value from our consultancy services when material quality and compliance are critical components of a product or service’s success but building in-house teams or laboratories is time consuming, expensive or simply outside the team’s expertise.
Strategies and Techniques for Consultancy Services
The beauty of leveraging Covalent’s material consulting services is that you’re not asked to come with anything other than a problem or challenge to solve. We’ll help you do the rest.
Our metrology consultants approach each project with the same structure. First, we’ll work with you to deeply understand the challenges you face with the materials or products in question. Then, we’ll understand where you’re headed – is the aim to achieve a compliance certification, to improve an element of the product’s performance (i.e. conductivity, durability, flexibility, etc.), evaluate the consistency of suppliers across a global supply chain, or troubleshoot a field problem?
From there we’ll help design a plan. Maybe we’ll head towards advance modeling & data analysis, or towards failure analysis. Maybe we’ll loop in our compositional analysis techniques or help design a quality control process in collaboration with vendors and suppliers. The possibilities are endless.
Best Practices for Effective Consultancy
Generally, when our customers engage us in a consultancy role, we’re prepared to act as the material experts. These are a few thing our customers can do to ensure we’re effective in the consultancy:
- Clearly define project objectives, technical challenges, and success criteria upfront.
- Engage consultants early in the processto guide technique selection, study design, or troubleshooting strategies.
- Gather complete background data, including prior methods, sample history, and known constraints.
Complementary Solutions
Consultancy involves providing professional advice, explanation, and recommendations in order to help in understanding material behavior, overcoming issues, as well as informed decision-making. Performance Optimization, being a closely related domain, can be stated to be a data-driven approach that concentrates on upgrading specific performance characteristics of a material, a process, or a product. Consultancy can be described as a domain that provides general knowledge and guidance, whereas Performance Optimization provides targeted means of improvement in order to accomplish efficiency, reliability, or functionality.
Why Choose Covalent for Consultancy Services?
At Covalent, we’ve built a state-of- the-art laboratory in the heart of Silicon Valley – seriously, you can’t go to the grocery store without bumping into someone deeply ingrained in the science behind the art of semiconductor fabrication, and our experts find themselves discussing the finer points of battery performance optimization with other parents at their kids’ Saturday morning soccer game.
What does this mean for you? We’ve built a world-class team, outfitted a world-class laboratory, and put it in the heart of the material testing capital of the country – then we made it available to you. We pride ourselves on creating bespoke, tailored solutions for our clients and tackle the thorniest material testing challenges around to ensure the safety, integrity and performance of objects and materials we all rely on every day.
To top it off, we’ve taken all that intellectual firepower and used it to make material testing itself a little bit smarter. We’ve developed tools and data platforms to house and analyze data automatically, shorten time from test to insight, and allow our clients to collaborate at scale wherever they are in the world.
Frequently Asked Questions
When should I consider hiring a consultancy?
If your material testing needs are outside the core capabilities of your company, they’re right inside the core capabilities of ours. Whether you’re designing products early in the R&D cycle and need help with material selection or evaluation, ensuring compliance with regulatory or safety standards, evaluating field failures, or managing complex material supply chains, we can help.
What types of problems can a consultant help solve?
Put simply, if the performance of a physical material matters to the success or failure of your product, Covalent’s material consulting services can help. We can take problems as large as understanding the performance of seals and coatings on a jet engine flying at 30,000ft. or as small as understanding the interaction between layers of thin film that are nanometers in size and break them into component parts to understand how materials behave and what that means for your product.
How is consultancy different from contract testing?
Our material consultancy services often encompass direct testing, but add in the insight, process design, and ongoing support to help our clients scale when they need ongoing access to experts, assistance with supplementing their internal expertise or equipment, or a flexible engagement where contract testing may not be defined or easily accomplished at the outset.
Do consultants work remotely or on-site?
The Covalent team works on-site in our Sunnyvale, CA laboratory. Depending on the challenges our customers face, you’ll often find us boots-on-the-ground in customers’ facilities, or out in the field with our customers evaluating performance and operating conditions. By gathering an understanding of the conditions that our clients operate in, we can design tests that simulate those environments that can be executed at our laboratory.
What should I prepare before engaging a consultant?
Come armed with as much information as you have, a clear goal in mind (or a clear problem to solve), and access to samples and material – we’ll help you through the rest. We thrive on data – what you see happening, what should be happening instead, what standards need to be met, or what regulatory requirements exist for your material.
Can consultants help with regulatory compliance?
Absolutely – if material performance is a component of your product’s regulatory compliance burden, we can design testing programs that demonstrate compliance with standards before, during and after manufacturing as well as ongoing monitoring to ensure compliance isn’t just achieved at a point in time, but maintained in active production.
Can Covalent consult about results obtained from other labs, or on results obtained from internal testing?
Yes – we’re happy to review results from other labs or internal tests. Sometimes, interpretation is all that is needed. At other times, review may prompt additional or extended testing to help explain results that you’re observing from other tests.
