Partnership's aims in brief:
- Drive quality initiatives in manufacturing further upstream in design, engineering and supply chain management processes to initiate a cycle of sustainable continuous improvement
- Reduce waste, scrap, rework, warranty and recall costs
- Speed up new product introduction cycles; respond faster and smarter to market and business changes
- Minimise risk in product releases by automatically preventing product releases if issues are found
- Prevent poor data quality by aligning with existing data in external systems such as product, supplier, customer and partner systems
- Shorten your inventory cycles by automatically releasing products put on hold in your production system when the appropriate investigation and release phases have been completed
- Improve communication and collaboration, not only within the manufacturing/production environment, but across the value chain
- Seamlessly integrate with other enterprise business systems
Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division and ETQ, a quality management system (QMS) provider, have announced a partnership that aims to assure quality from concept to customer. The partnership says the collaboration will enable improved data-driven decision making throughout the entire process, producing better, more consistent products in less time and with less resource and enabling progressive smart manufacturing strategies.
The partnership connects Hexagon’s vendor-agnostic inspection and measurement solutions with ETQ’s stakeholder-connecting QMS to produce a digital thread that automatically captures quality control and assurance processes - currently performed manually. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are applied throughout design, production, customer service and support the cloud platform also helps users to rapidly identify and analyse issues by producing actionable insights.
ETQ
ETQ Smart Factory Illustration
Rob Gremley, CEO of ETQ, said: “Manufacturers in a range of industries – automotive, life sciences, heavy manufacturing and beyond – will derive immediate value from the integrated data thanks to higher product quality and fewer defects, scrap, rework or recalls. As the Smart Manufacturing environment evolves, this level of data-driven automation and integration will deliver the ability to maximise the quality and efficiency of the complete manufacturing lifecycle and create the foundation for autonomous manufacturing and true digital transformation.”
Paolo Guglielmini, President of Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division, said: “Consumers perceive quality based on their experience. It is the manufacturer’s brand reputation, it can add significant value to a product, and it combines every aspect of the product lifecycle. Our customers trust our solutions to connect the shop floor to the top floor with pervasive quality assurance, and this new addition to our ecosystem will further support their journey towards Industry 4.0.”
An example of how the partnership will benefit customers today is in resolving a nonconformance incident, leveraging inspection and measurement data collected and managed by Hexagon’s Q-DAS and eMMA software solutions with full traceability and best in class Statistical Quality Control (SQC) and Analytics, and integrated with ETQ Reliance’s QMS.
Hexagon’s existing quality control solutions can identify a nonconformance from, for example, the Production Part Approval Process, Failure Modes and Effects Analysis, or customer feedback, at which point the digital connection between that manufacturing solution and the ETQ QMS will autonomously generate a nonconformance report (NCR) without human intervention.
Typically, the action to halt or modify production of the faulty product is handled manually or with limited technological help, but with a combined Hexagon-ETQ generated NCR solution, a corrective action can be automatically triggered in production and the information simultaneously updated in the company’s enterprise resource planning system to put the affected product batch on hold. This prevents the release and potential negative consequences of defects, efficiently digitising the quality management process and providing an unprecedented degree of integration across the manufacturing lifecycle and support smart manufacturing strategies and aspirations.