Every company in manufacturing has the challenge of reducing the number of defective products. Quality inspection is a must; otherwise, faulty products will appear one way or another.
Defect products can cause damage and be expensive, resulting in customer complaints, downtime, labor costs, and scrapped products.
Therefore, dedicated people are often used as the quality checkpoint, visually looking at the production line – which costs time and money.
The quality check is critical, but manually checking each product slows down the production phase since you must ensure the inspector can keep up with the production line.
Is it worth it? Well, it’s necessary to ensure high-quality products – even though it’s an expensive post for the company. In some cases, where risk is high, the cost of letting defective products slip through is considered worse. E.g., delivering faulty products to a client/customer could result in lost contracts/agreements. Therefore, it’s essential to avoid these scenarios and reduce errors, even if that often means having a lot of resources in place and a slower production phase.
A well-designed systematic quality inspection will have a positive effect on:
- Downtime
- Defective product
- Loss of revenue
- Lost customers
- Wasted time
- Wasted resources & man-hours
- Wasted money
- Decreased OEE / utilization
- And more..
In most cases, posting a person on the production line at each point of quality is often too expensive – so let’s talk about alternatives using new technologies like computer vision.
