How Can Automated Microscopy Improve Your Manufacturing Business?
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While homemade, handmade, and artisan are the buzzwords for consumers today, we all know that they’re not suitable for all industries. In fact, more and more manufacturers are discovering the benefits of adding automated microscopy in their processes today.
Here are some of the benefits of incorporating this into your manufacturing system:
1. Increase precision and consistency.
Of course, one of the biggest reasons to automate anything is to standardize the production processes for a specific item. The same goes for automated microscopy, though instead of working on bigger pieces, your employees work on items that areon a much smaller scale.
For example, instead of aligning linear stages one-by-one for numerous batches, you can simply have the entire thing programmed to position at the same space. This will help ensure that you get the right alignment every time. In turn, this lets your people get to work on your productsfaster and easier, minimizing the risk of churning out substandard pieces.
2. Detect flaws that cannot be seen by the naked eye.
When it comes to industries such as electronics and automotive manufacturing, “good enough” is never good enough. After all, even the smallest of flaws—such as a scratch or a hairline fracture—can lead to a defective device. To some extent, the same thing rings true for manufacturers of home implements. After all, a small crack can get worse; the product may end up falling apart during delivery, even if it were carefully handled.
For automobiles, these small issues can be even deadly, as they can lead to accidents. If an accident is caused by a defect, then you—the manufacturer—will be held liable for them.
Meanwhile, for those in the food industry, the “defects” that manufacturers would be looking out for come in the form of microbes or mold. Obviously, these should be spotted before the entire batch would be shipped out; no one wants to sell spoiled food. Hence, it’s important to detect these kinds of imperfections before the item rolls off the assembly line and gets put on sale at a store.
3. Save time and money on manual QA.
As stated above, an automated microscopy system won’t just detect the flaws in the finished product or minimize the chances that a defective item is created. While setting up this kind of system requires a fair amount of money, it’s actually cheaper in the long run. How?
The reason is simple: it’s faster and more efficient than hiring or training a battalion of people to do repetitive QA tasks. Instead who you’ll need are a smaller number of experts to handle these machines or to conduct periodical maintenance tasks. The operation or maintenance of these systems are also more engaging for humans to do, unlike some tedious QA tasks.
As you can see, automated microscopy offers a lot of benefits for manufacturers that justify the cost of its implementation. After all, whatever you may end up spending for this system is still smaller than the cost of a major product recall or lawsuits because of defective products.
Source: http://www.smarttechtoday.com/how-can-automated-microscopy-improve-your-manufacturing-business/15712/
