The role of the digital factory in measurement technology

Our blog today deals with the question of what role quality assurance (QA) and in particular measurement technology will play in the digital factory. What is changing as a result of digitization 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, measurement technology will also play a major role in the digital factory. It is probably even more important than before. The reduction of batch sizes, the individualization of products and the use of innovative manufacturing processes such as additive manufacturing pose new challenges for measurement technology, as testing random samples is often no longer enough. The measurement technology solutions are ideally suited to ensure process stability in addition to product testing and compliance with tolerance limits.

Measurement technology as part of QA will establish itself as a partner of production, not as its controller. This has been the wish for a long time, but it is certainly not the reality everywhere. When measurement technology is established directly on the shop floor, existing process and organizational boundaries disappear here, which will improve the direct dialogue between production and QA. Measurement technology provides early and therefore directly implementable information and thus reduces “wrong and correct” waste.

Digitalization is THE driver of change, as technical innovations only enable the outlined possibilities and, on the other hand, require a radical rethink. Digitalization increases customer individualization, thus reduces batch sizes and thus makes retrospective testing of individual parts as a sample often nonsensical. More flexible production systems — such as the flexible booking of current orders using currently available 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, if necessary, adapted without jeopardizing the comparability of the measurement results.

Of course, new technologies such as optical sensors or computed tomography solutions are also providing new impetus in measurement technology. While it used to be primarily concerned with identifying the relevant pain points of a component for further processing, gigantic amounts of data can now be collected first and then processed at will. The trick will soon be no longer to find and measure points, but to find and, above all, interpret the correct, relevant parameters from the measured, huge amounts of data. And here too, the new opportunities — AI and machine learning — will play an important role in the future. We see these technologies as a “finding machine” for the measurement technician, identifies and selects the technology outliers and potential problems, and allows the measurement technician to concentrate on analysis, interpretation and feedback.