Enabling Quality 4.0 on a Smart Factory

Challenge

Model Based Enterprise (MBE) has become a dominating manufacturing strategy during Industry 4.0 era where an annotated digital 3D model of a product serves as the single source of truth for all activities in that product’s lifecycle. In that sense, establishing digital continuity between the product design and manufacturing becomes essential. Moreover, as soon as a manufacturing company has adopted Model-Based Definitions (MBD) for its products, manual efforts and human resources spent on quality management processes become really questionable, and optimization of these efforts looks like a very logical, consistent and mandatory step towards implementing Quality 4.0 practices for the company.

Technology solution

Open Cascade Commercial Platform capabilities are leveraged to optimize all stages of digital inspection process and reveal the full value of MBD for enterprise quality management:

• Product Manufacturing Information (PMI) from MBD is used for automated generation of measurement programs for inline quality checks and for automated generation of Work Instructions for manual or visual inspections.
• MBD enriches measurement results coming from industrial internet of things (IIoT) solution and opens the door for fully automated “nominal-actual” comparison and quality reporting. This includes a link to MES to ensure full situation awareness to the shopfloor personnel and generate real-time quality statistics for the company management.
• Manual quality checks for a one-off product are guided by digital 3D work instructions generated automatically from MBD. This kind of solutions can be especially crucial for companies focused on limited or individual production (ex. turbine generators or centrifugal compressors, etc.).
• All inspection activities are performed while keeping visual access to all 3D information for quality cross-checks. Advanced reporting capabilities like actual inspection coverage for a complex product are also available instantly.

Business value

Combining information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) in an end-to-end shop floor solution breaks down silos, reduces costs over the entire process and results in considerable timesaving on quality control. Intelligent matching of virtual (3D) and real-world (measures) data enhances this effect even further by minimizing risks, preventing downtime and giving full visibility for faster decision making.