Case Studies: Parallel ID System Improves Quality Control
The Briggs and Stratton small engine facility (Poplar Bluff, MO) builds 14,000 units per day of the Quantum 4-cycle engine. Billy DePew, manufacturing engineering technician, had a goal to improve traceability of completed engines coming off the line. This meant being able to trace a nonconforming part back to the pallet it was produced on, the date of manufacture and work shift, in order to check other engines of that batch to determine the exact corrective procedure. Working with engineers at Balluff (Florence, KY), a manufacturer of sensors, transducers and ID systems, he added a Balluff parallel passive inductive ID system to help identify specific engines within their production batch. With this system, engines that did not meet Briggs and Stratton's rigid quality standards could be isolated by a time stamp-date and time of manufacture-that was applied to each block, providing traceability and accountability for work performed by Briggs' operators. The ID system helped Briggs and Stratton flag missteps before final engine assembly, and reduce scrap-increasing throughput and the overall quality of its engine components.
Working with the Balluff team, DePew determined that a Balluff 60R read-only passive inductive identification system could provide information to help improve quality tracking on the engine line. The Balluff BISC-60R-001-08P ID system installed at Briggs and Stratton consists of a parallel, self-contained read head, an 8-bit parallel device resembling a 30-millimeter inductive proximity sensor. This read head works with 1,023-byte Balluff BISC-12805/L data carriers, one each mounted on the machining pallets. The data carriers are rated -20 to +70 C.