Darryl Seland

The fundamental goal of automation is to reduce reliance on manpower. Whether for traditional manufacturing or additive manufacturing, it is important to understand the capabilities of supporting post-process manufacturing and metrology for validating that process.

Quality control of products with metal-based materials can be challenging, from working with recycled metals to the rise of additive manufacturing (AM).

So, what do we mean when we talk of post-process monitoring? Quite simply, it is the process used to monitor both the process and the finished product against their specifications, which include logging process routines and results in order to inform the machining and finalizing of the product.

A host of tools are available to metrologists in today’s manufacturing environment. Many are simple, mechanical, and accessible to anyone who wants to measure something.

Statistical process control (SPC) software is a large part of data collection and analysis in the modern manufacturing environment where quality control is a necessity. To understand what is needed from SPC software nowadays, we need to first understand the difference between traditional, on-premise SPC software and an e-commerce SPC solution.