Bob Salerno, mechanical engineer and co-founder of New River Kinematics, talks about the advantages of measurement planning (MP), a module of the software program called SpatialAnalyzer.

“Measurement planning is almost like a scripting environment for any repetitive analysis you have and the measurement of data that you do over and over again,” he said. “The idea is that it gets you away from the tedium of doing the same thing over and over again. Likewise, this offers managers the assurance that a measurement or analysis was performed the same way each time.”

Many engineers have experienced the process of part verification on their factory floors, and know it can be time consuming. “A lot of timespeople have exported data to Excel for calculation, special statistics, or some treatment of the data. Measurement planning provides the operator
with a place to do that within SA—the MP module can coordinate automatically, gathering data or it can provide a guide-through for the data gathering process. The operator can then use MP for analysis and reporting operations, too,” said Salerno.

SpatialAnalyzer has other advantages as well. One of the most important quality control processes is finding out if a part is out of tolerance or not. Challenges in this process can be varied, but often time is one of the most important concerns. Exporting operations can take days if data needs to be sent to another place for results, such as an analysis group. And another delay can occur when manufacturing is held up while waiting for data analysis to return. The part sits on the factory floor or assembly line while data analysis is occurring.

These challenges are being minimized with measurement planning in SA. “The operator can measure and say it’s good to go. Now, the case is reduced to a minute or so,” Salerno said. There’s also less room for error. “Sometimes, ina measurement system, a mistake could occur and with the old system, the data would go off for analysis, and they’d find out something’s wrong. But, due to uncertainty about where the mistake is located, either in the part or in an error of the measurement system, they’d re-measure it, and send it back to be analyzed,” Salerno said.

There are pitfalls in the process that can be eliminated with SA’s closed loop feedback. “Before they move the instruments, an engineer can see what point is out, and there’s a visual presentation of that point out of tolerance. Therefore, the operator can know what’s causing that,” Salerno said. This empowers the operator to resolve the problem quicker.

It also means that the issue may be prevented from happening again. Mistakes are trapped where they happen, either during fabrication or data acquisition and analysis, and then fixed. These time-saving advantages are why SpatialAnalyzer is a software solution that’s changing the industry. Portable metrology continues to grow in function and SA provides universal solutions that save time, money and energy in the long run.