Reducing the manufacturing cycle time serves a vital role in increasing the revenue of an organization. Managers are therefore reluctant to consider implementing additional layers of quality assurance that might negatively impact their productivity or manufacturing cycle time. This article explains how InnerVoice can enhance quality surveillance without reducing productivity or increasing the manufacturing cycle time.
InnerVoice is installed in manufacturing environments where thousands of parts are made daily. Prior to InnerVoice, quality was ensured through a bookending process, where one or more parts are removed at regular intervals from production and destructively tested. If those parts pass inspection, then all of the production parts made up until the previous inspection are deemed acceptable.
For large-lot manufacturing of mission- or safety-critical components or for parts where destructive testing is the only definitive means of inspecting weld integrity, bookending is a necessary and well-established approach to manufacturing quality assurance. Nevertheless, it has shortcomings. The most obvious shortcoming is that it only provides definitive and tangible feedback for the parts that were tested. The quality of the remaining parts is based on blind faith.
A second shortcoming of the bookending process is timeliness. If one of the designated test parts fails, then the manufacturer must (1) temporarily stop production, (2) isolate the suspect parts made since the last successful inspection interval, and (3) perform an engineering fault diagnosis. Once the engineering fault diagnosis is complete, the manufacturer will initiate a recovery action to salvage as many suspect parts as possible and then resume production. Based on the manufacturer's production-floor policies and procedures and on the results from the engineering fault diagnosis, hundreds of parts may be at risk of being scrapped.
InnerVoice eliminates this second shortcoming by providing immediate feedback on off-normal process behavior. As a result, fault diagnosis and risk mitigation can be performed promptly when the process exhibits abnormal behavior rather than waiting for some pre-determined bookending interval. Scrap can be reduced from hundreds of parts to just one, while throughput is increased and lost productivity is minimized.
Inevitably, when one contemplates adding an additional layer of quality assurance to a manufacturing process, they immediately think about the burden associated with the additional layer of inspection. This burden comes in many forms, such as the need for additional human resources and capital equipment, the requirement for regular training and maintenance, and most importantly the impact on the manufacturing cycle time. Unlike other inspection processes, InnerVoice works quietly in the background in a fully-automated manner. The manufacturing quality surveillance is performed in (near) real-time without any human intervention. A manufacturing engineer or process owner is alerted immediately only when off-normal behavior is detected.
Paradoxically, InnerVoice speeds up production and reduces scrap without extending the manufacturing cycle time. While bookending quality assurance may remain a necessary component of a large-lot manufacturing environment, InnerVoice can enhance and mitigate some of the shortcomings by providing immediate quality feedback on off-normal process conditions.
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 help your organization increase productivity.