E-quality control for automotive gear housing assembly application

Many global enterprises are now operating their production facilities in foreign countries in an effort to capitalize on the merits that each country provides. In such environment, where design, production, supply chains, and other business functions are geographically separated, great challenges exist in terms of how to effectively measure, control and monitor the product quality on remotely situated production lines. In this context, this paper presents a novel, holistic, network-based quality control strategy, which is called EQM (short for e-quality for manufacture). With EQM, remotely situated designers can access real-time quality data and update quality control processes as changes in production occur. EQM also allows the quality data to be integrated within the company's information network with other related business functions. Such integration enables instant generation of corrective actions, such as automatic notification to supply chains/vendors for non-conformities. EQM relieves human operators from laborious, tedious, and error-prone tasks of quality monitoring and sampling practices, hence greatly improves the overall efficiency of production operations. The proposed remote-quality control strategy has been tested using the networked-robotic cell, which produces automotive starter gear housing assemblies. The results vindicate the notion of EQM, manifesting many potential benefits for industry.