The life sciences manufacturer with plants in the US, Canada, UK and Ireland, produces a range of prosthesis and is striving to continuously improve the quality of its products and cut down on waste. As part of this initiative, the customer has chosen a smart, paperless quality inspection solution from ATS because of their experience within highly regulated industries such as life science and pharma.
This quality inspection solution allows inspectors to increase their effectiveness by using electronic devices and electronic checklists to record and store non-conformances or defects directly onto an image of the product or its part. Management can then immediately view on-line reports such as Statistical Process Control (SPC), defect distribution, type, repair status and “buy-off”.

Image: Cindy Funk,
bluegreen_owie, flickr.com, (CC BY 2.0)

This solution can also analyse inspection data from multiple sources. This can include automated inputs from robotic cameras and machines and manual inputs from operators. Automatic response/decision making allows the system to automatically move the product into a repair bay if needed.

A custom electronic checklists can be created by downloading the CAD images from PLM software and by downloading the product configuration and serial numbers from ERP. This is another very powerful feature which requires no manual intervention and makes it a true Smart Manufacturing and Industry 4.0 solution with cyber-physical systems linking the virtual and real worlds of manufacturing.