Quality control is essential throughout the development, building and distribution of any product. It ensures that the end customer gets the best possible product that won’t fail during use—something especially important for products that could lead to safety hazards if faulty. The manufacturing industry is the frontline of quality for many essential parts and products, making innovations in quality control valuable assets for successful manufacturing. Let’s explore why quality control is so significant, and how we focus on it here at American Manufacturing.

Why Quality Control Matters

Quality control increases product quality and reliability while decreasing the risk of failures or defective parts. For instance, in the steel containers we build for the automotive industry, the welds must be solid to guarantee container integrity. If the welds are skipped or weak, these containers could come apart and create a dangerous situation when stacked high and filled with heavy parts and materials.

Robotic welding has played a large role in helping us guarantee strong welds in all the right places. But while welding innovations like cobots have reduced the likelihood of skipped or weak welds, quality control procedures give a final inspection to make sure the cobots are doing their jobs properly. We double and triple-check each weld to make sure we only send top-quality products out the door. This attention to detail is what really makes our welding and assembly departments a cut above the rest!

The Latest in Manufacturing Quality Control: Robotic Vision Systems

While much of quality control relies on skilled workers inspecting parts and products throughout the manufacturing process, further automation has led to significant improvements in quality control. The latest and greatest of these are robotic vision systems.

As AI has improved and become better at identifying objects, robotic vision systems are able to scan parts and recognize what should or should not be there. This makes the quality control process much faster and more accurate than the naked eye can achieve, improving significantly upon legacy vision systems.

Case Study #1: Electrical Wiring

Robotic vision systems have been applied with a virtual reality approach for electrical wiring. The system can project a schematic onto the board in portions, only showing the operator where to lay the wire in that specific phase of the process. So long as they only lay wire where the schematic indicated, the likelihood of wiring mistakes is greatly reduced.

Case Study #2: Bending Press

We have personally utilized robotic vision systems with our bending press at American Manufacturing. Vision systems on the bending press allow us to check bends and parts by holding them up to the PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) to scan and identify whether the correct part is being shaped. With the recent hype around the robotic bending cells trend, we expect quality control for bending to improve even further!

Quality Control Best Practices at American Manufacturing

We care about delivering reliable, high-quality results to our customers, which requires meticulous attention to detail and intensive quality control measures. We quality control every product and every part with detailed checklists to inspect and keep records of each product throughout the manufacturing process, making sure they are spatter-free, have no sharp edges and are built with quality welds.

We perform two full quality control inspections on all of our containers, racks, pallets, and custom builds: one inspection after welding, and the other inspection after paint and assembly, as a final inspection before sending out the door. This helps us to catch any issues or imperfections that may have been missed the first time around while also giving us highly detailed records of everything we manufacture.

Interested in learning more about quality control at American Manufacturing? Contact us to learn more about our services and products for over a dozen industries!