Traceability Enabled Quality Inspection
At a glance
Focus: Traceability Enabled Quality Inspection.
Challenge: Product quality: Due to continuous pressure around increasing the production, improving the product quality had been emerging as a big challenge for the company.
Approach: Inclusion of a Robot-based vision system to enable complete product inspection
Impact: Complete product quality traceability: with lifetime data by capturing real time inspection data and ensuring zero data loss
OMRON AUTOMATION
Headquartered in Kyoto, Japan, OMRON Corporation is a multi-billion-dollar, diversified company with business units producing industrial automation products, electronic components, and healthcare equipment and ticketing systems. OMRON Industrial Automation is a global leader providing complete automation solutions for industrial applications. It brings innovation to manufacturing sites through automation with "Integrated”, "intelligent" and "interactive" concepts with one of the world’s most sophisticated Input-Logic-Output-Robotics + Safety (ILOR+S) technology including the proprietary sensing technology.
OMRON Automation – India, now more than two decades old in the country, caters to over 7 industrial applications encompassing the wide requirements of packaging, automotive, material handling, solar, food & beverages, textile and panel building applications. The company is focusing on the solution business, including Robotics and IIoT, providing “One Stop” solutions, to improve the overall efficiency on diverse production sites. Focusing on the themes of quality, safety and the environment, they support manufacturing innovation worldwide with their unique sensing & controlling technologies. OMRON is rapidly expanding its operations with focus on all major cities making its presence felt across the country with a strong network of offices, automation centre, training centres, sales & marketing force, application teams, resident engineers and channel partners to address the ever challenging requirements of the customers. A major factor in OMRON’s progress globally & locally has been the strong commitment towards its customers keeping ‘Quality First’.
OMRON AUTOMATION
The organization is engaged in the manufacturing of various cooling systems and plastics parts for auto makers and aspires to be a leader in innovation with steadfast in its commitment to create sustainable long-term success.
Business challenge
Product quality: Due to continuous pressure around increasing the production, improving the product quality had been emerging as a big challenge for the company.
Product quality: Due to continuous pressure around increasing the production, improving the product quality had been emerging as a big challenge for the customer.
Cumbersome manual inspection: Due to manual inspection system for assessing the product quality, NG parts were mistakenly supplied to their customers.
Faulty inspection process:Also, owing to manual inspection, operator was bypassing some of the steps in the inspection process which was leading to lot of expensive rework ultimately impacting the production rate.
Multiple check points:With 25 variants, the team was facing issues around more than 60 check points that were mandatory to check. Besides, the customer was not keen to adopt a fixed camera-based solution.
Industry 4.0 solution
Inclusion of a Robot-based vision system to enable complete product inspection traceability. The sponsoring thought was as soon as the inspection component comes on the conveyor post completion of the assembly process, it should land on the station that is enabled with a robot-based vision system to inspect the automotive component part and store all the inspection data with the inspection images directly to the factory’s server enabling the complete product inspection traceability.
OMRON being the market leader in motion control, controllers, vision systems and safety system, was chosen for one-stop solution for their packaging machines solution. The solution reduced TCO and eliminated requirement of PC and customized software requirement. It also enabled the machine controller to send all data to OMRON Database controller which was then sent directly to the cloud system.
The application focusses on the final vision inspection of the automotive component along with storing the result data and inspection images in the server for product traceability.
Owing to the high amount of flexibility required in terms of number of models to be inspected, OMRON conceptualised Articulated robot + Vision camera.
In this, OMRON Viper 850 Robot is integrated with FH vision system. The robot is inversely mounted on the roof to cover maximum area of the component for part inspection.
The component before entering the robot cell is scanned by OMRON RFID V680S to identify the model. Based on the model, the recipe manager changes the program of the robot & vision for that particular model.
The Robot then moves to the programmed positions and the Vision camera is triggered to capture the image for inspection. The robot , vision camera & the PLC are connected on one network for fast and seamless data sharing.
The vision camera inspects the missing part, colour, shape, orientation & measurement. Once the inspection is completed, the result data & inspection images are sent to the server against the serial no. of the component enabling the product traceability.
Key benefits
| Area | Outcome |
|---|---|
| Quality | Complete product quality traceability: with lifetime data by capturing real time inspection data and ensuring zero data loss. |
| Quality | Best quality product output: towards zero defect, thereby strengthening the brand image and increasing the market share by 6%. |
| Time & Speed | Productivity increase: Customer could achieve the best cycle time of 32sec from 65sec of manual inspection. It increased the productivity to meet the market demand and enhance the business value. |
| Traceability & Compliance | Increase in profit : by reducing the product rework, product recall from 2 to 0 over two years, and improvement in the assembly and testing processes via traceability. |
| Safety & Workforce | Manpower skill enhancement: on advance automation and approach to industry 4.0. |
| Operational Benefit | Better RoI :Keeping up with the targeted RoI, OMRON’s optimized automation solution gave a RoI of 2.5 years against the customer’s expectation of 3 years. |
Technologies used
Change management and implementation
As this was the first Bigdata quality inspection project with the approach to Industry 4.0 for the customer, leadership tasks were assigned for better communication and smooth installation
New concept for the customer:Introducing the Robot based quality inspection was a new concept for the customer. To overcome this, team OMRON developed a prototype proof of concept with the Robot and vision system inspecting two real time variants with all the inspection points requested by the customer.
Need of orientation: Customer was new to OMRON’s Robot. Robot programming and maintenance was a new skill for them to learn. Hence, a three-pronged approach for training was followed encompassing maintenance & programming of robot, vision system, NJ controller & RFID, along with health check-up and troubleshooting.
Need for specialized programming:Storing the result Images and inspection data against the customer product part number required specialized programming in the vision system & the machine controller. Team OMRON developed special customized function blocks in machine controller & macro programming in the vision system
Big data collection with Images for analytics and Traceability:It was required to capture all the inspection results along with the inspection images and send the same to the SQL in real time without any data loss. OMRON NJ Database controller connected the SQL directly to the customer’s SQL database to store the data without any intermediate software and additional programming. Enabling the spool function ensured there was no data loss. OMRON FH Vision system shared images to IPC on network sharing with the file name as well as the component part number for easy tracking.
This new solution took a significant transformation that created an opportunity for the customer project team and maintenance team to learn new skills on the Bigdata & Robotics
Both the project & maintenance team were involved from the beginning of the project for OJT. This helped the customer to handle the solution for program modification, health check-up and troubleshooting.
Owing to manual inspection, the operator was frequently missing out the errors due to fatigue and no data maintenance. After the automated inspection solution, the operator skill level improved. With the knowledge of handling and troubleshooting the system, his routine inspection job got elevated to a more skillful job.