A full-inspection cycle that used to require an entire day now takes about 40 minutes to complete. Crown Cork and Seal Co. Inc. (Sandston, VA), a plastic bottle closure manufacturer, required a higher inspection speed to keep up with a doubling in demand for bottle caps from a major soft drink maker.
The company had been using a manual coordinate measuring machine (CMM) that was 15 years old and had a slow computer. "The need for a more productive CMM was clear," says Kelley Parkes, systems administrator at the Crown Cork and Seal plant. "Once we started getting faster production, we had to update the quality assurance as well."