|
|
InspectionXpert First-Article 2010
25 Feb, 2010 By: Nathan BymanUser Review: CAD-based tool for quality-inspection reporting allows one person to do the work of five and still meet the demands of customers.
Editor's note: This article was originally published in the Winter 2010 edition of Cadalyst magazine.
MIC Group is a contract manufacturer of complex machined products and assemblies, specializing in exotic metals and serving the oil and gas, aerospace, and defense markets. A subsidiary of J.B. Poindexter Company, we have operations in Brenham and Houston, Texas; Duncan, Oklahoma; Monterrey, Mexico; and Kuala Lumpur, Selangor, Malaysia.
As a contract manufacturer, MIC Group must provide inspection data sheets with true, measured dimensions for every part we ship. On average, our parts have 300 dimensions to verify, and they often have as many as 1,800 elements. A tool called InspectionXpert First-Article has enabled our company to reduce this verification task from a five-person job to a one-person job, all while reducing job lead times and improving the accuracy of reported data.
Launched in 2005, InspectionXpert was designed to simplify the process of creating inspection forms and ballooned inspection drawings for first-article and in-process inspections. These reports and drawings are created directly from CAD drawings of just about any file format, including AutoCAD, SolidWorks, and Solid Edge, as well as CAD-neutral raster formats such as PDF and TIFF. The InspectionXpert platform is also fully integrated with many popular CAD packages including AutoCAD, SolidWorks, Solid Edge, Pro/ENGINEER, and CATIA V5, and even more integrations are in the works.
The Challenge
Dimensioned drawings come to MIC Group in PDF and TIFF formats from a variety of customers, and with continually changing revisions. We use InspectionXpert First-Article 2010 to:
- apply sequentially numbered balloons (or bubbles) to the face of these prints so we can track the inspectable dimensions;
- create an inspection sheet, including the reference number and actual dimension, that will travel with the parts and will be filled out by the machinists and inspectors throughout the process; and
- compare drawing revisions to evaluate the manufacturing impact.
These vital functions are easily recognizable by any manufacturer that works with prints and must deliver a data sheet deliverable in addition to a part. What is often overlooked, however, is how much opportunity for improvement exists in this standard process.
In my experience, companies use hand bubbling, Adobe Illustrator, CAD systems, and a variety of other suboptimal tools to move quickly through one facet or another of the process, and they typically treat the three processes above as discrete activities to be performed by different people.
The most powerful advantage of InspectionXpert First-Article 2010 is that it completes these three tasks simultaneously and in less time than any one of them could be performed using any other familiar method. When you evaluate collapsing these functions, you aren't just looking at an improvement in one area — instead, it's a total process that, in our experience, is five times faster.
How It Works
Simply open prints in InspectionXpert First-Article 2010 and begin to highlight elements.
The InspectionXpert First-Article user interface shows sequentially numbered balloons that are automatically added to a print each time a user highlights an element.
1 2
|
|
AutoCAD Tips!
Autodesk Technical Evangelist Lynn Allen guides you through a different AutoCAD feature in every edition of her popular "Circles and Lines" tutorial series. For even more AutoCAD how-to, check out Lynn's quick tips in the Cadalyst Video Gallery. Subscribe to Cadalyst's Tips & Tricks Tuesdays free e-newsletter and we'll notify you every time a new video tip is available. All exclusively from Cadalyst! |
Poll not yet available. |
