Quality Assurance - Introducing Automated First Article Inspection Series

I have intentionally kept Quality Assurance separate from Quality Control as they are generically different departments that look at production from a different viewpoint.

Quality Assurance institutes the procedures and practices in a global sense for the company ensuring that all aspects of Quality are covered procedurally as well as all aspects of traceability are covered. The will also ensure that ISO standards are adhered to. The Quality Control people ensure that the procedures, practices and inspections are performed using the correct papers and documenting this fact for traceability reasons.

The aspects of Automated First Article Inspection that affect Quality Assurance are discussed in this blog section of this series. For all processes within manufacturing the QA department must ensure that there are records detailing that the process, inspection or procedure has been performed as well as traceable documents exist relating to this fact. 

At First Article Inspection there normally would be a FAI sheet filled in by the operator signifying that the inspection has been performed. This document would then need to be filed appropriately complying with the traceability aspect of the quality plan for that product. With an Automated FAI such as Cluso this is documented automatically using the reporting and archiving functions contained in the system. The system would automatically document the operator, Batch numbers of inspection, Quantity of part inspected and list all failures noted in the FAI performed. This PDF report would be simply filed in a secure server location by batch number providing full traceability the inspection was performed to satisfaction.

In Engineering there is a little known hole in the QA process. The SMT Engineering department receive BOM's and CAD data from the customer and convert them into Pick and Place files. The CAD data contains the Reference Designators and X/Y coordinates and the Bill of Material details the parts. The SMT Engineering must manually merge the two datasets together to output the P&P file. This is a manual process that risk which is hidden and normally only found out if a 100% FAI is performed which verifies the assembled PCB sample against the customers BOM. With an automated FAI this process can be desk checked with the differences reported automatically. 

The ultimate effect on QA that an Automated FAI has is extremely positive and a very simple, effective solution for these manual processes. The automated solution streamlines, documents, and turns this incredibly important issue into a simple traceable process solving many problems in one easily implemented solution

Greg Ross

Cluso Vision Systems