Your
machine vision inspection systems are an excellent source of data
about your products and processes. Yes, you can track dimensional
shifts, but what about changes in color or texture? What about cavity
numbers?
Those
can all be tracked and used to generate data about the variation
within your processes. Logging cavity numbers for instance is a great
way to find out where your molding scrap comes from. And as you know,
continuous improvement thrives on data.
The
problem is, adding these capabilities to an inspection system can be
difficult. We’ve all had someone from Quality ask, “Can the
vision system tell me xyz?” And the answer usually goes along the
lines of, “If you’d asked me that when I was developing the
application, yes. Adding it now is expensive.”
Of
course, defining requirements is just good project management. I’m
just urging you to add data collection to your list before
you start designing and developing.
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