In the highly competitive global economy that exists today, businesses cannot afford to compromise on quality. With IoT applications penetrating deeply into manufacturing, these industries can leverage its benefits to aid them in guaranteeing quality assurance of their processes and products. Data, when collected and analyzed, can help manufacturers assure the quality of their processes and products, as well as predict and prevent failures proactively.

Quality assurance ensures that customers receive products free from defects, increasing productivity, process efficiency, time to market, customer trust, and market popularity. Extensive quality inspection, at every stage of production, is thus critical to business success for manufacturers. This approach can easily prevent major recalls in manufacturing, immensely preserving the brand value in the market. However, ensuring that every process and product delivered by the manufacturing ecosystem is perfect without exceptions can be quite a challenge, especially when quality assurance essentially involves an increasing proportion of manual intervention. This is where IoT applications come to the rescue, meeting the ever-increasing need for continuous manufacturing quality assurance.

IoT – supporting the transition from reactive to proactive QC

IoT technology transforms quality control (QC) into a proactive approach from a reactive response. With the enormous number and variety of products being manufactured every day, using traditional techniques of QC is not practical. Process and product data collected from IoT sensors and IoT devices help manufacturers to obtain real-time metrics. This assures consistent quality and performance improvement. The advantage of IoT-enabled quality assurance is that it provides actionable insights. These insights identify and eliminate quality bottlenecks before they occur. Instead of catching mistakes reactively, you can proactively prevent process and product malfunctions.

IoT-driven QC solutions

Manufacturing verticals have processes and products that are both sensitive and critical in nature. So, how does a manufacturing company use IoT to boost its quality control efforts?

• An IoT platform serves as a critical foundation for in-depth quality assurance through in-depth process and sensor-derived data analytics. Intelligent IoT-driven solutions use an algorithm-based approach on all the data collected from manufacturing assets and processes. In-depth insights delivered through this approach contribute to detecting, prioritizing, and eliminating critical problems in manufacturing processes to meet established quality standards. For instance, IoT-driven quality assurance solutions can identify and rectify process parameters that influence quality outcomes and the degree of their influence.
• IoT solutions support manufacturing stakeholders in monitoring the quality of raw materials and finished products. This happens at every point of the manufacturing process. Such IoT-driven approaches help them identify and block weak raw materials. In addition, it helps them process intermediates by monitoring critical product, process, and equipment protocols in real time.
• Analytics can be performed on data collected from completed components or products to monitor the performance of critical manufacturing steps. In case they deviate from the desired specifications, an alert is issued to pinpoint the problem. Extensive insights including type of defect and time of occurrence help maintain the manufacturing line’s quality.
• Detection algorithms can also identify the contributors or anomalies to a reduction in quality. These can be used as signals to predict the future degradation of quality.
• Quality reports provide the manufacturer with a proactive quality assurance model. This helps create the foundation of the company’s future quality control plans.
• All this leads to earlier identification of quality problems, reduced manufacturing defects, improved process efficiencies, increased production, and reduction of service and warranty costs.

Product-process analytics for better quality assurance

The introduction of IoT technologies in product design and smart manufacturing removes human error and boosts quality control efforts. Thanks to technological leaps in IoT and automation, quality control is undergoing a significant transformation today. Product analytics in tandem with process analytics considerable enhance the quality of the final product. This ensures the yield and performance of the products and ultimately delivers greater protection for the business.

WeMakeIoT specializes in leveraging IoT technology to create end-to-end solutions not just ensuring quality at every stage of the manufacturing ecosystem, but also across every manufacturing ecosystem. Building efficiency across the manufacturing network through industrial IoT applications is one of our core areas of specializations. Connect with us at https://www.wemakeiot.com/ to explore further options in IoT-driven manufacturing solutions.