Reduction in defects

The direct cost for product quality issues are considerable. Handling problems related to quality also carries substantial hidden costs. In addition, the long-term impact for repairing your brand and the lost revenues are immense. Maintaining quality will always be an essential part of building assembly lines. On top of it all, you just need to be faster and more adaptable for smaller batches while handling more complex products. 

The increased complexity of your products along with smaller batches and faster takt times add challenges in the quality assurance of the production. The production system shall ensure that no product leaves your site without fulfilling your quality demands. The costs for testing, verification and re-work are often significant. Instead, you need to minimize re-work activities in your production by building a quality assured yet flexible production. But, that it is difficult to craft and even more cumbersome to maintain.

Quality is on top of our minds in every development, installation and discussions we have at Atlas Copco. We constantly look for new ways of decreasing quality costs by deploying new technologies. One of our customer reduced the re-work by 15% by applying Atlas Copco’s Pick-to-Light solution. The solution ensures the operators to continuously pick the correct parts. Thus, avoiding defective batches of products. The Smart Connected Assembly concept is built for quality management supporting Industry 4.0.

Defects can be caused by construction flaws, process design, tools, operator, parts, poor training and several other reasons. To successfully manage quality issues, you need to quickly and accurately identify the root cause that can be found anywhere in the system. By analyzing you can reduce and even eliminate quality costs in your production. To understand the fundamental cause, a system perspective is needed. Smart Connected Assembly offers exactly that! The components in your production are all integrated into one system. Assembly lines, workstations, tools and the operators together form a system. And your job is simply to identify the root cause, bottlenecks, and quality risks. The Smart Connected Assembly solution offers a wide range of enabling technologies to identify and reduce defects. • Configuration management tools enables reuse of quality assured configurations • Virtual work station allows for quality secured scaling without new hardware • Operator guidance gives direct feedback and supports operators on new processes • Products like Pick-to-light and TrueAngle are used for smart quality management And while delivering value on many various levels, Smart Connected Assembly gives you the ability to analyze the process to find the root cause The Bottom Line Smart Connected Assembly not only reduces the risk of defects during production, it ensures that the quality is maintained over time. It also enables you to faster identify the root causes of issues. Welcome to Smart Connected Assembly! Smart Connected Assembly supports Industry 4.0 becoming reality. A reality where technology is easy to use and quickly delivers value. Read more about Smart Connected Assembly and Industry 4.0 – CLICK BELOW