By Mike Boyer
Enquirer staff writer

COVINGTON - It's a weighty subject that's the focus of a gathering this week at the Northern Kentucky Convention Center.

The International Society of Weighing and Measuring is holding its biennial conference through Friday. The four-day event is expected draw upward of 750 professionals in the business of making, selling and servicing commercial scales - everything from the countertop scale at your local supermarket to heavy-duty truck scales.

You may not realize it, but weighing, and being weighed, are important to almost every aspect of human endeavor.

"When you enter this life, you're weighed. When you leave it, you're weighed. And at every stage in between, everything you touch, basically has been weighed at one stage or another," says Richard Sharpe, program chairman and president of Intelligent Weighing Technology Inc., an Oxnard, Calif., scale distributor.

Weighing and measuring are particularly critical in the pharmaceuticals industry.

"You can't just make any old stuff, put it into a tank and ship it," said Sharpe. "You've got to identify what it is, tell who made it, when it was made and what it's full of, and include sell-by and consume-by dates. We can help with all this."

John Betz, owner of Cincinnati Scale Co., in Carthage, said this is the first time the organization, begun nearly a century ago as the Scale Makers Association, has held its international meeting in Cincinnati.

Betz said the nature of the business has changed significantly since his father founded the company in 1972.

"When my father started the business, it was 80 percent sales and 20 percent service. Now it's 70 percent service and 30 percent sales," he said.

As the industry has consolidated among a handful of large manufacturers such as Mettler Toledo Inc., smaller firms such as Cincinnati Scale have focused more on repair and service.

"Weighing machines in general are cheaper and better than they were 10 years ago," said Sharpe.

The increased use of computers and stock electronic components has driven scale prices down, said Sharpe.

At the same time, the industry's latest buzz involves the linking of weighing machines to central data collection systems for either financial or regulatory control.

Several companies, including Sharpe's, will be exhibiting scales that produce time, date, and lot number as well as weight. "It makes your business run better," he said.

On Friday, the society opens its trade show to local businesses for $10. For information, visit www.iswm.org.

E-mail mboyer@enquirer.com