When your shop is faced with a sudden shortage of coordinate measurement machine operators or a temporary hike in demand, you may turn to contracted measurement service providers for help. Whether you’re bidding on a contract or you’ve already won one for a short-term production run, bringing in outside help can be a cost-effective method to increase your inspection capacity. It makes sense when you don’t have a guarantee that future business will be able to pay for expanding your in-house abilities. Outsourced metrology services are increasingly being brought on-site for a number of reasons. The biggest advantages to increasing your abilities within your own facilities are cutting down on transportation costs and wait times.
One option for short or small production runs is outsourcing to a metrology shop to put one of their trained operators in your facility with one of their machines. If your production is based in manufacturing cells, introducing an outside operator is one way to cut down on waste like work-in-progress inventory and overproduction. This is also a great solution to keep up your sleeve for holiday scheduling and sick leave. While you may not be able to predict sick leave, you know how many coordinate measurement machine operators you have on hand and how many vacation days they’ll take in a year. Planning for their absence means you can avoid bottlenecks and delays in inspection.
Tooling verification and machine inspection are two other requirements that can be met on-site. When you have a tool that’s too large to quickly disassemble and ship, or that you can’t afford to have inspected in a lab, on-site inspection is the way to go. Setting up a new production line can be a task beyond your metrology team’s time and training, too. In this case, ISO-17025certified technicians can get you up and running painlessly.
Bringing a metrology company on-site can also be particularly useful when you’re dealing with large parts. CMM – Canadian Measurement-Metrology – brings portable arms and laser scanners to do onsite jobs. Laser and white light scanning is particularly useful for on-the-floor inspections, as they are unaffected by vibrations caused by nearby activity. Optical scanning is ideal for large components in the automotive and aerospace industries. On-site quality control means faster turnaround, shorter delays, and catching defects as they happen. Companies like CMM will also offer services such as 3D scanning and reverse engineering for molds and engineering models.
When you’re looking for contractors to bring into your shop, look for a full range of ISO certifications and ACLASS/ANAB accreditation, as well as certifications of compliance from coordinate measurement machine manufacturers like Hexagon. Laboratory capabilities will always be more diverse than on-site capacities, especially where large-footprint tools like gantries are needed. Nevertheless, new portable technologies are bringing ever more accurate and versatile solutions to the shop floor from contractors like CMM. When you have capacity issues in your facility, get in touch with expert metrologists who bring fast, on-site solutions.
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