Aiming to enhance manufacturers' real-time quality management efforts, enterprise quality and compliance management software provider IQS has announced an integrated application to provide workers with up-to-date inspection data on various suppliers and multiple products during the parts receiving process.
Announced at the Automotive Industry Action Group's annual AutoTech conference in Detroit last week, which this year focused on collaboration among competing supply chain partners, the Mobile Inspection application ties together IQS' core quality software with handheld hardware devices to provide the most current inspection data from a bevy of suppliers and to alert shop floor personnel to the presence of nonconforming parts or those otherwise not up to spec.
Using the Mobile Inspection application, workers with handheld devices can scan a part and have its product characteristic data compared against current specifications and inspection rules stored in the IQS application. If a nonconformance is identified, the supplier can be notified with the appropriate details in real time, and issues can be resolved in a much timelier manner than with manual processes, the company said.
The mostly manual processes surrounding quality management reflect the way people traditionally have thought about quality, Simon Jacobson, a research analyst with AMR Research, told Managing Automation in an interview today. "It's [been] very much an afterthought," Jacobson said. "Extending real-time capabilities not just to data capture, but as [inspection] documents change, can bring quality into sync with other processes."