Going Mobile with Quality Inspection

Inside the Airstream factory in Jackson Center, Ohio. (Image courtesy of AP Photo/Jay LaPrete.)

The term ‘digital transformation’ might sound buzzwordy enough to elicit eyerolls from even the most enthusiastic marketing director, but it doesn’t have to be. For example, a digital transformation might simply mean switching from a paper-based system to an electronic one. That’s old hat for those in the service industry, but manufacturers tend to be more resistant to such changes.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” are still the words of wisdom on many a shop floor—but what engineer can resist finding a better way to get the job done? Take Airstream, maker of iconic trailers for nearly a century. For all its success, the company’s manufacturing operation is far from what you might imagine in a smart factory of Industry 4.0.

“Airstreams are unique because they’re hand-crafted,” explained Eric Clinton, quality assurance manager at Airstream. “If you take a tour of our factory, you’ll see that it’s not like an automotive plant with things like robotic welding. We use a lot of manual processes and a lot of aircraft-type construction.”

(Image courtesy of Alumapalooza.)

Even handcrafted products can undergo a digital transformation in their manufacturing process, as Airstream’s quality team recently learned after partnering with Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence to develop a custom quality inspection app. The partnership’s goals were to reduce quality defects, improve root cause analysis and shorten production times—and according to Clinton, it succeeded.

Here’s how he summed up the new application at this year’s HxGN LIVE:

“It’s a final inspection app that gives our quality auditors at the end of the line and throughout the plant a specified list of what to look for, as well as a list of attributes underneath each item that tells them what could be wrong with that item,” he said. “It allows us to capture all that data, as opposed to hand-written reports that have to be collated and sampled. It takes a long time to get that hand-written information back to a production manager. By capturing it electronically, we can get it back to them immediately.”

(Image courtesy of AP Photo/Jay LaPrete.)

Prior to this digital transformation, Airstream inspectors worked with blank paper forms and tribal knowledge, which meant that losing an experienced inspector or training a new one were both far more costly than they needed to be. With the new app, “if there are specific items we want to key in on, we can tag them and get that information to a production manager instantly,” Clinton said.

Making these kinds of changes isn’t always easy—especially when you’re dealing with an old guard that’s wary of new things—but, as Clinton explained, the quality app was well received by even the most skeptical inspectors.

“It was interesting to see the deployment, because I have one guy on my team who was probably the most scared of this new technology—he told me that he didn’t sleep the weekend before it went live,” Clinton said. “I picked him first, so he was the first one to use it, and within 15 minutes he said, ‘You know, this isn’t really that bad; I can do this.’ This is a guy who’s 55 and has never touched an iPad in his life.”

(Image courtesy of Airstream.)

Minimizing the disruption to existing employees is vital to successfully navigating a digital transformation, but in this case, the greatest benefit comes in training new employees. “We get new inspectors in through regular attrition and this makes it really easy to train them, because they can get up to speed on what we’re looking for very quickly with the app,” Clinton said. “I would say training has gone from a matter of weeks down to a matter of hours.”

For more on digital transformations, check out The Connected Factory and More: 5 Examples of How IIoT is Changing Manufacturing.