Modern manufacturing relies on consistency, and tolerances are tighter than they’ve ever been. Production capabilities are up to the task, and CMM systems help ensure that completed or in-process parts are within tolerance. The real challenge comes when anything goes wrong. The CMM can tell that a part is out of spec, but that’s just a symptom and rarely provides enough information to identify and correct the problem. The standard first question is “Is there a trend; will this be an ongoing problem?” It’s not an easy question to answer since the cause could be in a fixture, in the tooling, in the stock material, or elsewhere.
It’s the kind of challenge a doctor faces in an initial patient visit. The patient presents a symptom, and the doctor’s job is to identify which of many possible causes to treat. Uninformed treatment can be ineffective or even harmful, and a trial-and-error approach will almost certainly waste valuable time. The experienced doctor’s approach is to collect as much additional information as possible—health history, X-rays, blood tests, and the like—and to add that additional data to the base of information provided by the patient. With this expanded knowledge, the doctor can proceed to narrow the possibilities, delve further if necessary, diagnose the problem, and prescribe effective treatment.