Increasingly, today’s progressive global manufacturers are implementing thoughtful, collaborative and comprehensive forms of front-end quality planning.

The Automate Show brought thousands of robots to Chicago this week. The robots were serving ice cream and beer, playing music, and in one case, boxing. They were wowing attendees with their speed and service, musical skills (the KUKA ones wore bows for their performance), and fight demos. Machine vision and image analysis was also on display.

For medical parts manufacturers, quality inspection is critical. Liability for defects, inconsistent quality, fluctuating supplier costs, increased globalization and device regulations all pose challenges for the industry.

Measurement is vital to any manufacturing business, providing essential information to control processes and verify products. But older co-ordinate measuring machines (CMMs) can become bottlenecks if they fail to keep pace with changing measurement needs.

Why statistics? Because they are possibly the most useful tool we have to understand what might happen.

Often, new technologies are designed to not allow communications with third-party quality systems. Here’s how to get the information you need from the systems you’ve invested in.

Pass/fail quality testing is the de facto standard for many manufacturers. But when you use only these basic tests, you miss out on some of the greatest opportunities for continuous improvement in your business. 

Confidence intervals show the range of values we can be fairly, well, confident, that our true value lies in, and they are very important to any quality practitioner. I could be 95% confident the volume of a can of soup will be 390-410 ml. I could be 99% confident under 2% of the products in my batch defective.

Most manufacturers will at some point overlook an out-of-control process and deliver an out-of-spec product. 

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions are everywhere in our lives. What advantages does a cloud-based software solution bring to manufacturing quality management?