High QA, a manufacturing quality platform that links 2D drawings and 3D models to inspection planning and execution, says customer Catamount Machine Works posted a 420 percent return on investment after replacing manual, spreadsheet-based inspection with the software. That beat the 386 percent ROI the aerospace and precision manufacturer had projected when it signed on, according to a case study High QA published in July.
CEO Chris Basgall, who acquired Catamount Machine Works, said the shop's inspection process previously ran through hand-ballooned drawings and Excel spreadsheets filled out by hand. "It was very time-consuming and prone to error," Basgall said. Catamount's own analysis of that workflow found inspection planning, report generation and documentation consumed roughly 480 minutes, or 8 hours, per job across 500 inspection jobs a year, for about $140,000 in annual labor costs. After adopting High QA, that dropped to 90 minutes per job and $26,250 a year, an 81 percent cut in prep time. For a shop juggling tighter tolerances and shorter delivery windows, shaving seven hours off every inspection package is the kind of margin that determines whether a QA department can take on more programs without adding headcount.
The platform's automated ballooning tool builds a complete Bill of Characteristics directly from a drawing or model. In one example Basgall cited, it identified and extracted 34 dimensions, 24 inspection characteristics, GD&T requirements, tolerances and inspection criteria in about 15 seconds. Catamount also runs High QA Inspection Manager, a digital data-collection environment that validates pass/fail results in real time, flags out-of-tolerance measurements automatically and opens nonconformance reports as inspectors enter data. "We no longer have to perform exhaustive reviews of every report like we used to," Basgall said. "The system catches issues as data is entered."
Catamount also automated its Certificate of Compliance, a document it previously built in Word, signed, scanned and merged into each quality package by hand. The CoC now generates automatically from the same inspection data already captured in the system. Basgall said the change "reduces errors, saves time, and presents a very professional image to our customers," who he said describe the shop's reports as "professional and best-in-class."
Catamount is now expanding its use of the platform into advanced reporting and multi-part inspection workflows. Basgall said the company plans to explore Model-Based Definition initiatives next.
