Sam Golan has 25 years of hands-on management experience in CAD/CAM, PLM, and manufacturing software.

It became clear to him that smart manufacturing is in a relatively good place and moving in the right direction to address Industry 4.0 challenges.

But in Golan’s view, quality for manufacturing is decades behind and is a huge bottleneck associated with high cost.

Quality 4.0 must be a significant contributor to the Industry 4.0 revolution happening in manufacturing, however, right now there is a significant gap between the two. The risk for the quality industry not closing, or at least not tightening the gap, will have a negative impact on the entire manufacturing industry.

This technology gap between quality and other aspects of the manufacturing process has steadily grown over the years. Some of the lagging has to do with the technology itself, and some of the responsibility involves business owners and managers who do not view expanding the quality function as a critical business need.

Jim Mangan, managing director of connected metrology specialist The Sempre Group, a High QA partner, and Ken Feitz from High QA, discuss Connected Metrology – Why Data and Connectivity are Key for quality manufacturing in 2022.

Quality is often a neglected area of manufacturing, seen as a box-ticking exercise to prove that specifications are met, rather than being a vehicle for improvement. As a result, many manufacturers keep track of quality data manually on paper or in isolated Excel spreadsheets, making it challenging to access information when needed. Essential quality management documents such as product part approval process (PPAP) reports are kept in huge filing cabinets, so files can be easily misplaced or difficult to find if there are problems with quality later on.

Manually managing and auditing isolated documents can introduce the risk of human error and waste employees’ time, costing the manufacturer thousands — a very poor use of a valuable workforce.

Tech Soft 3D, the leading provider of engineering software development toolkits, announced that High QA, a leading provider of integrated quality management software solutions for industrial manufacturing companies around the world, utilized the advanced toolkits in the HOOPS Native Platform to streamline and improve quality processes. By improving CAD data access and 3D data publishing, High QA empowers their customers to accelerate development of powerful engineering applications with fewer mistakes.

When it comes to quality processes, it’s simply not practical to hand someone a 3D model and tell them ‘Okay, go work with this.’ By combining Tech Soft 3D’s technology with High QA innovations around efficiency and automation, companies can make 3D MBD useful for quality processes – and, in the process, to streamline their quality processes and efficiently work in partnership with their entire supply chain.

When Chick Machine landed a new aerospace contract that required inspection documentation the shop had never produced before, it had little time to overhaul its inspection department and put an end to handwritten inspection reports.

Converting the shop to a digital inspection management system didn’t feel like an option but a necessity. “We have to evolve this capability or we will be left behind,” said Bobby Petrini.

With the new inspection management software, the quality control department was trained to create quality plans in High QA, a new and very different process for some employees. And for many of the machinists on the floor, inspection was no longer paper documentation with risk of inconsistency, errors or missing measurements altogether if a machinist was confident in the part.

Job shop owner James Marzilli was doing the right things but profits weren’t where they were expected to be. The problem was bigger than any single project. One lesson of this Boston area manufacturer’s recent, rapid growth is that mismanaged inventory, lack of standardization, quality documentation errors and other systematic inefficiencies that do not always show up on a balance sheet can have as much impact as anything happening on the machine tools.

Those of us on the march towards Quality 4.0 in our manufacturing companies are grappling with the challenge of producing high quality parts with a minimal investment of time and resources into new inspection methodologies.

How do we know that it’s “good” data? Where is the data stored? How can we best present it to our customers, quality system auditors, and internal staff?

Until recently, there were way too many individual pieces of software crunching data from machines, devices, instruments, and gages and storing it in independent, disconnected folders housed in a myriad of places, including desk drawers! Here’s the good news: software solutions are available now that truly streamline inspection and measurement data and even go beyond that functionality.

Details of any medical device’s manufacturing processes must be completely traceable so manufacturers can monitor product quality, make timely updates, and quickly recall defective items. Traceability extends from the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to suppliers of individual components.

Should defects occur, cradle-to-grave tracking makes it possible to pinpoint exactly where changes in product quality initiated.

High QA’s software keeps measurement and inspection of medical parts – from all suppliers – on the same page.