Automation

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Many manufacturers want to automate but struggle to figure out where to begin. 

Mukesh Kumar, a SAP Premium Engagement Leader and enterprise transformation strategist, has spent more than two decades designing and delivering large-scale quality, compliance, and digital transformation programs across regulated industries. 

Antigone Sharris is a full-time faculty member of the Engineering Technology Team at Triton College. She is also faculty lead, NFPA Fluid Power Fast Track Hub Site; faculty advisor, Phi Theta Kappa Honors Society; and mentor to the Team 2151 Robotics Team.

Robots are no longer confined to fenced cells performing repetitive tasks on the factory floor. 

Machine vision cameras have crossed a threshold.

The landscape of automotive quality control is undergoing a profound transformation. 

As professors Hirotaka Takeuchi and John Quelch stated in their famous Harvard Business Review article, “Quality is more than making a good product,” emphasizing that in manufacturing, excellent customer service and support are just as crucial as the product itself.

You see it a lot with e-commerce. Online shopping is said to offer an advantage. An array of “reviews” posted by other shoppers of the product you are considering. Amazon and others have converted these comments on the worthiness of a product into tools that help browsers decide if they want to become purchasers.

No two eggs are identical, yet all are edible. This principle applies equally to industrial manufacturing: the diversity of produced parts and potential defects is virtually limitless. The added challenge for quality assurance and identification tasks?

Quality teams now rely on a dense stack of tools: automated test frameworks, AI assisted test generation, self healing locators, visual testing, static analysis, and observability platforms.