Digital transformation initiatives that aim at getting manufacturers to Industry 4.0 have been around a while and will assuredly continue to be with us for quite a while longer. But what can often get lost by manufacturers in the push to digital transformation are the reasons why one would want to undertake this journey in the first place, which in turn should all boil down to one essential reason: Preserving and enhancing the company’s position in the market.
There are many ways to do that, of course. You can improve efficiencies, for example, and increase throughput. But another area that’s incredibly well-suited to digital transformation initiatives is reducing total cost of quality and, in particular, reducing the costs of defects to manufacturers.
Why defect cost is important to target
That’s important because the costs of defects to manufacturers rapidly pile up in several ways: Defects that make it out the door to customers—so-called “escapes,” for example—are, of course, very costly. But in attempting to mitigate that problem, many manufacturers generate a different problem for themselves: They configure their machine vision systems to see defects that aren’t even there—so-called pseudo defects, false calls, or false rejects—which in turn results in the high costs of unnecessary rework or waste.
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