Quality Control Through Vision Engineering
An automation systems builder from Modular Automation of Birmingham, United Kingdom once remarked that quality with continuous inspection is the reason for the recent consideration of most manufacturers to shift to automated assembly from manual methods. Going automated is not necessarily for speed or faster production. This direction towards quality control enables manufacturers to compete in the markets which they had previously failed to penetrate.
It is important to note, however, that production speed is not being disregarded. While quality may have gained the primary objective of production, speed is still important because manufacturing organizations still need to meet the required number of production cycles in order to set a realistic price for their output as well as acquire adequate supplies for the market.
Before, manufacturing companies tend to meet their required capacity and allow the quality of their products to suffer in process. However, with the technology available today, manufacturing companies are able to achieve reliability and precision in production. Such enables them to achieve the management concept of “Zero Defects” with ease.
To make in depth, manufacturers are able to achieve virtually faultless quality through two segments in the production process. These are precision engineering and continuous inspection.
Precision engineering is accomplished through production experience and the knowledge and acquisition of top quality components. The sales manager of Modular Automation has commented that it doesn’t make any sense to redesign everything from scratch since it is much better to perfect a technique and then reproduce it time and again to achieve a similar operation. This modular approach to engineering design enables the best quality engineering on even the simplest assembly systems without going over the budget.
Continuous inspection is equally essential in order to prevent errors from being committed. However, it is an impractical approach to check manual assembly at every stage since there are technological innovations that are available to monitor the output after every station of assembly. An example is vision technology. Another example of a simple tool for checking quality is the measuring microscope.
A measuring microscope is a vision engineering equipment that allows precision measurements of production output. There are different types of measuring microscope that would suit quality control needs. A measuring microscope may even be used for batch testing of a certain assembly line. Hence, a measuring microscope does not necessarily mean that only one output can be tested because it can verify the quality of a batch of production.
As such, outputs that are discovered to be faulty can be immediately removed from the production line in order to prevent unnecessary work being done. Also, faulty outputs may be returned to the previous operation for correction.
Employing such techniques would result to a virtually guaranteed flow of perfectly assembled products. This is said to be impossible to achieve by manual production methods alone.
Furthermore, there is also a move in the marketplace dynamics that would encourage British companies to invest in automation in order to ensure quality. Before, global manufacturing companies tend to set their sights on developing countries in order to enjoy the advantages of cheap labor costs in increasing their profits. However, health and safety requirements have been issued that demand quality output over quantity. Since quality output can only be achieved by mechanical means, the advantages of gaining cheap labor force has decreased. This had caused British manufacturing companies, with experience in design and innovation, can compete on global terms, cheap labor notwithstanding.
