The cost of poor quality is at the forefront of every plant manager's mind. While the direct costs of producing defective components are relatively easy to quantify, such as scrap, rework, and recalls; the indirect costs can significantly impact a company's profitability, such as increased audits, lost sales, and declining brand reputation. As a consequence, the majority of a manufacturer's time and resources are spent tightening tolerances, ensuring compliance, and/or increasing post-process destructive and non-destructive testing. While such efforts are important to a quality-assured and quality-controlled process, there are diminishing returns for higher standards through increased destructive and non-destructive testing. In most manufacturing environments, the process itself is treated as a black box, where the inputs are tightly controlled and the resulting product is thoroughly tested but the in-process behavior is largely overlooked.
For most manufacturers, very little is known about the relationship between the in-process physical behaviors of their manufacturing process and its corresponding quality and repeatability. However, if variability exists within the process, then it will inevitably manifest itself as a change in the in-process behavior. Therefore, monitoring the in-process behavior can enhance, complement, and extend the engineering efforts that have already gone into the process and circumvent the diminishing returns resulting from a need for improved product surveillance.
InnerVoice prevents flaws from becoming defects by monitoring the in-process behavior and flagging anomalous conditions in real-time. The application of InnerVoice to a manufacturing process can lead to significant advances in a manufacturer's ability to characterize their process and improve their understanding. When successfully implemented, InnerVoice can result in a fundamental shift from the present conformance and inspection mindset towards a predictive approach emphasizing fundamental process understanding. The tangible and quantifiable benefits to the manufacturer are (1) process characterization that is based on what the part actually experienced, not just on knob settings on a machine tool, (2) reduced scrap and rework, (3) root cause analysis capabilities, and, most importantly, (4) catching flaws before they become defects.
The use of final inspection to verify product conformance to specifications and statistics to quantify process capability to consistently meet these specifications are almost 100 years old. In-process dynamics therefore represents the first potentially new concept in manufacturing quality control for the 21st century and may well be as far-reaching in its impact as statistical process control has proven to be during the last century.
To learn more about in-process monitoring, see our article "What is In-Process Monitoring?" Or contact us today to learn more about how InnerVoice can reduce the financial impact associated with the cost of poor quality.