Success story: Error-proofing a customer's calibration process with the STbench and QA Supervisor

Regularly checking the performance of your tools and calibrating them when needed is vital to maintaining accurate results and high-quality products. To accomplish this, it is wise to use an instrument that is even more accurate than the tools themselves to read, calibrate, and/or validate them.

Our customer, an electric vehicle manufacturer, would periodically check the performance of their tools, but they were looking for a complete quality assurance solution to maintain their tool population that was fast, reliable, and easy to use. We introduced them to our joint simulation bench–the STbench connected to QA Supervisor. Read on to discover why our customer chose our joint simulation bench over our competition’s and why you should too.

Atlas Copco’s STbench is state-of-the-art in real joint simulation. This bench is designed to simulate real joint characteristics and guarantee tool testing in real operating conditions without interfering with your assembly. In this way, the STbench helps you to break away from traditional tool calibrating practices, like hiring an external company to validate your tools. This means you’ll benefit from reduced costs because you and your operators can run tool tests on your own.

Alternatively, QA Supervisor is a server-based software that manages and collects data. Every time you or your operators perform quality inspections, including residual torque checks, tool checks, and non-torque-related quality checks like visual and dimension inspections, QA Supervisor records the data collected. This makes QA Supervisor ideal alongside the STbench for handling tool calibration status.

At Atlas Copco, satisfying our customers’ needs is our top priority. Originally, our customer would periodically check the performance of their tools and calibrate them as needed. When they reached out to us for a better way to test and validate their tools, we knew just the solution they needed: a STbench connected to QA Supervisor. This solution would benefit their production by making tool validations easier and more accurate than their current process and by recording the data collected for complete transparency of their production processes.

fter looking at our solution and comparing it to our competitors, this electric vehicle manufacturer knew ours to be best suited for them for several reasons. The first reason is that our STbench is 50% faster than other solutions on the market. Plus, our bench has other benefits, including automatically testing wrenches and communicating with the Power Focus controllers to adjust tool calibration values automatically. They were also satisfied with QA Supervisor since the software collects data from ToolsNet 8 to easily compare quality and production data. Lastly, they were already using some of our tools for residual torque checking and were thus familiar with the user interface.