A New Way to Look at Your Manufacturing Process

A picture is worth 1000 words.  This anecdote has been used time and again, by just about everyone you know.  Today, I am going to show you how you can get a picture of your manufacturing process, and how this picture will be worth far more to you than just 1000 words, it will be worth dollars in your pocket, both in reduced production time, faster QA and more responsive quality recalls.

Meet Sciemetric, a company that has pioneered in-process review and testing of your production process.  Sciemetric has developed a complete hardware and software offering that will allow you to systematically get a “process signature”, effectively a picture of the electrical signals within your process, and then compare each and every component you produce to that original signature.

Using advanced analytics, we can setup thresholds, values, slopes, and many other analytics on your process to ensure that your process is repeating itself correctly over and over, and in the event it isn’t, give you an immediate failure on the part, allowing you to quarantine the part, and more importantly, look at WHY the part failed.

I could go over this in very fine detail, but as they say:  A Picture is worth 1000 words, so check out the pictures below and the explanation that follows. (Click on screenshot to enlarge)

Here, we have several quick screenshots of a peak force check.  This could be a press exerting force on a part, or the peak force of fastening something to another using a bolt.  You will see that this part has failed due to the peak force being too much, this could cause cracking or damage to the component (like my tires bolts when the nuts were tightened too tight and cost me $400 in new studs and bolts).  Below you will see the same process on a part that has passed all of our QC checks:

Notice how quick and easy it is to determine what failed?  We could be doing dozens of checks on a process and can easily drill down from the main screen (pass/fail), to the specific checks and see what feature (check) failed.  From there we can drill down into the waveform itself to see where the failure occurred, all within seconds of the product being manufactured.

A picture truly is worth 1000 words, and possibly several 1000s of dollars.  There is a lot more to this technology that I will be drilling into in future articles, check back often to see what else Sciemetric can do for you.