Today’s manufacturers face new challenges every day, trying to maintain quality in a world where new products and technologies evolve virtually by the minute. Staying competitive means churning out great product at great speed, without the risk of unexpected downtime. Under such pressures, it is no longer reasonable to rely on a sluggish quality inspection process, where a quality team periodically takes samples made yesterday (or even an hour ago) and reviews them for possible deficiencies while production roars merrily along. A look at any number of recent product recall events demonstrates just how flawed this “after-the-fact” approach has become. Particularly for automakers and other highly complex manufacturing sectors, undetected quality issues slipping by on a regular basis opens a Pandora’s Box of disastrous fallout implications later.

Instead, consider the crucial advantage that can be attained when comprehensive monitoring of quality is performed in real-time, right on the production line and the production team members are fully involved. With continuous automated quality checks, trend analysis and more, quality is measured, known, assured, proven and maintained as part of manufacturing. This level of up-to-the-minute awareness on the production line can prevent issues upfront, plain and simple. Unscheduled downtime, lengthy back-trace investigations of quality issues, and other related operational inefficiencies virtually disappear.