Check out the April 2021 edition of Quality, featuring Navin S. Dedhia, 2021 Quality Professional of the Year, gage solutions, ERP, Automation, NDT, and much more!
Navin Dedhia has been a pillar of the quality community since the 1960s, speaking and working on five different continents about the importance of quality.
Even with the availability of hundreds of standard precision tools and gages, sometimes measuring challenges are best solved with a specially made gage. It is critical to work hand-in-hand with engineers who are dedicated to making sure that an accurate and easy-to-use custom-made solution can be attained for specific application requirements.
Quality standards require that measuring equipment be calibrated prior to being put into service. In addition, the maintenance of measuring equipment requires recalibrations at regular intervals.
In the middle of the most chaotic, uncertain months of 2020, manufacturers discovered that the perfect antidote was to double down on quality and reliable delivery—turning to their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems for the timely insights needed to navigate rapid changes in market demand and resources across their supply chains.
With the manufacturing industry growing more complex every day, it’s hard to imagine operating a manufacturing enterprise without an ERP system. The software provides a critical central communication point for the business, handling all activities from quote to cash and everything in between.
If January is the month of resolutions, April is the month of renewals, a time of spring cleaning. Like people, businesses of all sizes undergo a similar ritual. Instead of tackling overstuffed closets, C-suite executives update their quarterly economic forecasts and prepare for the second half of the year.
Even in today’s constantly evolving world, there remains a truism. Those who are more successful produce better results than many of their peers. They do it better and faster than their counterparts. This is not intuitive for everyone. It has to be developed or redefined.
Sunk costs are defined as costs that have already been incurred and cannot be recovered. Proponents of the sunk cost fallacy argue that since it is a cost paid in the past and unrecoverable, it should be removed from any future decision making.
In my last column I listed some basic equipment requirements for the calibration of thread plug gages so I thought it would be helpful to give mating gages the same treatment.
Force testers and material testers have expanded into industries such as medical, plastic, and aerospace to assure that strict product performance and reliability standards are met.
Deciding whether to purchase a force tester for basic testing or a material tester for advance testing could be a challenge based on the multitude of options and functions which are available today to meet your test requirements.
To a qualified and well-equipped nondestructive testing technician, few inspections present an insurmountable technical hurdle. Technicians have a range of testing methods at their disposal, from sophisticated ultrasound and eddy current technologies to manual processes like liquid penetrant.
Handheld X-Ray Fluorescence (HHXRF) analyzers verify materials quickly, reliably and cost-efficiently. They can identify a material’s elemental makeup within seconds, making it easier for manufacturers to select the right metal grades and tolerances for their needs.
The days when only large companies could adopt automation are long past. Collaborative robots (cobots), lightweight industrial robot arms (LIRAs) and affordable peripherals such as vision systems and grippers have created a new paradigm by making low cost, easy to use automation solutions available to small-to-medium sized companies for the first time.
High-mix, low-volume (HMLV) manufacturers have faced extensive challenges when it comes to automation. The need for detailed planning, programming and jigging that comes with most automation systems (especially robotics) makes them fundamentally inflexible in adapting to the varied parts, processes and work methods that HMLV manufacturers need to get the job done.
Vision guided robotics (VGR) is an automation technology well-recognized for enabling greater flexibility and higher productivity in a diverse set of manufacturing tasks over a wide range of industries.