Video: MCR Safety ISO 17025 Certified Lab

Glad you did that, I'm not doing that.

I have the greatest job in the company, I destroy all products. They don't fail, so it takes me a long time, so I got to keep doing it. This is a tough glove.

The MSC supplier profile series sharing innovations in safety.

Hi, Rebecca here, category manager for MSC. Today we're at MCR Safety, a leading manufacturer of gloves, glasses, and garments. Today we'll be checking out their ISO certified lab where they test all of their items that come out their manufacturing facility to ensure quality. So excited, let's go check it out.

So Jerry, Aileen and I are so excited to be here, today what are we looking at?

Today, we're looking at the innovations Technology Center and how MCR Safety provides the finest quality product for MSC to ensure that you guys protect people out there in the field. So, I'm Jerry Porter, I work in the Quality Assurance department here at MCR Safety. My title is mobile operations supervisor, and I ensure the finest quality products in the world here in our innovation’s technology center.

We originally started, we had three different companies: Memphis Glove, River City Garments and Crews Glasses. In 2004, we merged the three companies together and we started looking at what competitors were doing, and we said how could we do this even better? And it came down to testing.

So I’m going to show you guys how we do cut testing for the ANSI test standard here at MCR Safety.

So they invested in the lab to say hey, test all this product and we're going to mark all the scores you get from it and say hey, it's cut resistant, this is the scientific data to prove it's cut resistant.

So every batch that comes to the factory you test at least one piece from that batch, correct? We take three random gloves.

Ah, three random samples, okay.

Yeah, there's no government oversight for any of these products. You can put ANSI A9 cut resistant, which is the highest level on everything, you stamp it, send it out the door. What's going to drive people to remove that A9 is when someone gets hurt.

We don't want people getting hurt to remove the score, we're going to have it right on the front end. So we utilize this lab to make sure anything we mark it, it's going to actually keep you safe on the job it's intended for.

If MCR products put an A4 on it, or or any marketing scores, we're making sure that's true.

We went and got ISO 17025 accredited, which is third party lab orders from international standards organization, so we got them to come out to make sure we do the tests properly. But also, that we're given stuff that would hold up in court, of course. We want our customers to feel confident in our products. Don't take our word for it, take our order as word has no interest.

So, if one of our end users in the field, let's just say unfortunately they get hurt and the glove that they were using says ANSI 2 or ANSI 3, we can send it back to you guys to test it to ensure that it's truly that level of protection, correct?

If MSC, if they see something too good to be true, then most likely is too good to be true and we ask them to send us some samples, we want to make sure it's apples to apples comparisons, so we'll test competitor products from other manufacturers to see if they're claiming that A6 on a product for cut resistance it actually is A6.

So ours, the entire front would be A9, that's how we manufacture. That's not always true for other manufacturers.

Got it.

They would know you're testing in the palm, sometimes have the palm beefed up. That’s one of the hazards you run into, so that's where the risk comes in. And that's where MCR Safety can help, making sure that the apples to apples is there free of charge for our best partners. MSC, we hook them up all the time. We're here to help, we're here to make sure people are safe, that's our mission in life.

This is my favorite test in here, I play a lot of airsoft so it's cool to see if the products going to hold up or if it'll get destroyed. This is our most basic economy pair, the BK11O made of virgin polycarbonate. I'm going shoot it with the quarter inch bb. Check that out, you can only shoot these bb's once and then they're no good anymore.

So that bb’s from a single source manufacturer and it's going to try to destroy this product. Looks very Mythbustery.

Yeah, we’re going to figure out—does it pass?

I mean, we've had people that work here who've been in other industries where they’ve taken injuries to the eye because they didn't have the proper eyewear on. They had eyewear on, it just didn't do the job. They claimed it was Z87+ when it actually wasn't, they didn't have a lab to prove that it was, they just purchased from some factory and they were hoping that it was.

Ready? 3, 2, 1.

So that little smudge was 150 feet per second.

That's all that that did?

That's it. No crack, no break. For example we had a story of a Navy Seabee, he was out in Iraq in 2004. He was wearing our glasses because he thought they were cool. And it just so happened they got ambushed and an explosion went off, shrapnel went towards his eye and it lodged right into his pair of glasses. If he hadn't had this MCR product on, it would have went right through his eye. Our product saved his life. He took the glasses off and looked at he's like it actually does it, put it back on and went back to work.

Our product saved his life. That was 660 feet for a second shrapnel four times the standard.

Wow.

So to give you reference, a 22 caliber bullet it 666 feet per second, that's the kind of impact our products can take, and that's almost value basic series.

That's amazing.

This stuff strong. So I'm proud to work for a company that can keep you safe even in the most intense situations, these hold up. We protect people whether they're out in the battlefield, or they are running into fires, or they're just cutting with box cutters. We make sure they're safe. We make sure they got the product when they need it, when the injury happens so it doesn't happen.

Going to the 21st century, we're getting into the hard environments, we're getting into the chemical resistance, impact resistance, getting into these tougher situations with machines that are slicing automatically. We got to make sure they're safe in a new technological environment, so that's how we're partnering with MSC to get the feedback from them, what are they seeing in the field that's not being protected? They’re our eyes and ears out there to make sure we're manufacturing products that get the job done.

That was awesome guys. Jerry is the man when it comes to all things testing. Really what we learned today and what was the most exciting thing to me, was making sure that when you guys put on a piece of PPE that it reaches the level that it says it does, the level of protection is there. The other cool thing is that MCR partners with us in the field to make sure that all the PPE, not just theirs, meets the standards that it says it does to make sure that everyone goes home safely at the end of the day. That's what true partnership is about.

For more information about this and more PPE, please visit https://www.mscdirect.com/betterMRO/.

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