Now more than ever, access to data provides the ability for process improvement and fine tuning performance for quality assurance. Without the right data, it’s difficult to identify or fully understand a problem, and even harder to solve it. The right tools can give you the information you need to take a closer look at your production line. One of these such tools is force and distance monitoring on factory presses.
What Data is Collected with Force & Distance Monitoring?
Force and distance process monitoring collects data from each press cycle that gives insight into part quality and product specs, particularly the pass or fail performance of machinery that can determine whether a part that’s assembled is up to quality standards and can move through the production line and into the field. The quality assurance capabilities alone make the data from force and distance monitoring highly valuable.
However force and distance monitoring equipment actually collects a range of data that assists beyond identifying defects and can help signal need for repair as well as other issues that can affect production and improve issue response. Storing and referring to this data over time can also help you to identify trends and aid a whole host of common problems in manufacturing and assembly operations. Let’s take a look at the problems that force and distance monitoring can help solve.
7 Problems Force and Distance Monitoring Can Solve
1. Identifying Quality Assurance Problems
Force and distance monitoring tools allow managers and engineers to track the production of specific parts by serial number, and monitor the performance of individual machines. The main function of force and distance monitoring equipment is reading force and distance achieved for each press cycle and determining pass or fail for a part’s assembly. When parts show faults, they can be removed from batching. When the cycle readings are off consistently, this may also signal necessary process modification or machine maintenance to bring a particular machine’s output back up to standards for consistent, repeatable production quality.
2. Minimize Field Failures
Faulty parts can be an expensive problem. The harder it is to identify where and how the fault started, the more expensive the problem becomes, especially if faulty parts have made it to the field and recalls are required as a result. Data-gathering tools like force and distance monitoring will show when a process didn’t meet parameters, and how long this occurred. This allows managers to quarantine the problem parts and improve the process that caused that fault, which can greatly reduce or even eliminate faulty products from making it to the final production stage or out to consumers.
3. Identify Slow-Downs & Bottlenecks
Not all production issues are extreme enough to cause faulty parts. Some incidents simply slow down production processes and eat into efficiency. Collecting and analyzing force and distance monitoring data across machines and over time can help to identify these issues. Trend reports can show, over time, how much production has slowed, and when it started. Analyzing patterns can help you determine if these slow-downs are a regular occurrence, if a machine has been losing efficiency for some time, or if another issue is occurring, like a fault within the machine itself that will require maintenance.
Comparing data across each process can help managers and engineers identify costly bottlenecks. Assessing the data can also help to provide the best solution, whether that means rearranging processes to better organize the timeline, using multiple machines to speed up processes causing a bottleneck, or something else.
4. Minimize Experimentation
Data simulations are extremely useful tools for analyzing potential process improvements or changes. This allows you to visualize the change before making any expensive reworks. This also allows you to assess performance under each condition, and see whether or not new features or test limits, for example, are adding real value to your production or not.
5. Detect Defects Before They Occur
Data monitoring allows managers and engineers to isolate key process variables and use these to determine when product defects are likely to occur. Regularly reviewing process data, making notes of product and process faults, and changing test limits accordingly, can allow for prediction of impending failure conditions before they happen. This can also help managers stay on top of maintenance, and make sure that machines are repaired or maintained before they reach failure conditions.
6. Reporting and Decision-Making
Gathering information on your production process and organizing this data by part and process not only gives you valuable insight into how each process is performing, but also makes reporting easier. When making assessments on a press process, force and distance monitoring machines give you access to important metrics that you can use in decision-making, whether that means analyzing new features, setting test limits, developing a new test strategy, making necessary equipment upgrades or something else.
Regardless of industry, data is the most powerful asset for assessing and solving problems and ensuring consistent product quality. With the right data in manufacturing, you can read insights into the performance of your machines, the quality of your parts, and track parts moving through production, to stay on top of any problems. If you’re interested in modifying your factory production with force and distance monitoring capabilities, contact us – we would be happy to tell you more about the data that can be collected, how it can be used, and what you can expect.