The role of the digital factory in the metrology

Today's blog deals with the question of what role quality assurance (QA) and in particular metrology will play in the digital factory. What is changing as a result of digitalization and which technologies will be in demand in the future? - Prof. Dr. Heiko Wenzel-Schinzer, CDO of the WENZEL Group, provides the answer.

Of course, metrology will also play a major role in the digital factory. It is probably even more important than before. The reduction in batch sizes, the individualization of products and the use of innovative manufacturing processes such as additive manufacturing pose new challenges for metrology, as the inspection of random samples is often no longer sufficient. The metrology solutions are ideal for ensuring process stability in addition to product testing and compliance with tolerance limits.

As part of QS, metrology will establish itself as a partner of production, not as its controller. This has long been the wish, but certainly not the reality everywhere. If measurement technology is established directly on the store floor, existing process and organizational boundaries will disappear, which will improve the direct dialogue between production and QA. The metrology provides early and therefore directly realizable information and thus reduces "wrong and right" rejects.

Digitalization is THE driver of change, as technical innovations make the outlined possibilities possible in the first place and, on the other hand, require radical rethinking. Digitalization increases customer individualization, thus reducing batch sizes and often making the subsequent testing of individual parts as random samples pointless. More flexible production systems - e.g. the flexible booking of current orders to currently free capacities - require more flexible measurement solutions. Measurement programs must be created in such a way that they can be quickly transported to other machines and adapted if necessary without jeopardizing the comparability of the measurement results.

Of course, new technologies such as optical sensors or computer tomography solutions are also providing new impetus in metrology. Whereas "in the past" it was mainly a matter of identifying the relevant pain points of a component for further processing, now gigantic amounts of data can be collected and then processed as required. The trick is soon no longer to find and measure points, but to find the right, relevant parameters from the huge amounts of data measured and, above all, to interpret them. And here, too, the new possibilities - AI and machine learning - will play a key role in the future. We see these technologies as a "finding machine" for the measurement technician; if the technology identifies and selects outliers and potential problems, the measurement technician can concentrate on analysis, interpretation and feedback.

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