When Wieland Chase decided to add forged parts to their traditional brass rod stock business, they were flooded with new part drawings. Quality Engineer Tad Scranton was looking for a faster, easier way to balloon part drawings and create check sheets for the shop floor. They found a solution with InspectionXpert, and what used to take two hours now takes 20 minutes.
Challenge
When Tad Scranton first joined Wieland Chase, they were solely a brass rod stock manufacturer. However, since the market was shifting and competition from overseas was increasing, they would need to diversify. They added brass forgings to their offerings, and right away Wieland Chase saw an increase in business. Adding manufactured parts with dimensions required a big shift in processes throughout the company, but especially in quality. Luckily, this was all in Tad’s wheelhouse. He started his career as a machinist, so he knew how to read part drawings, machine, and measure parts.
When Wieland Chase first began manufacturing forged parts, they had a huge influx of part drawings and proposals. “The minute you thought you were keeping up, you weren’t,” says Tad. It would take Tad two hours to balloon a part drawing and create the check sheets for the floor. He was using Microsoft Word to bubble the part drawing, then typing up the dimensions and callouts in Excel to create his check sheets. Then if there was a revision to the part, Tad would have to manually renumber each balloon in Word and update all his check sheets. “I knew there had to be a better way to do this,” says Tad.
How InspectionXpert Helped
Tad scoured the internet, looking for a tool that could make ballooning the part drawings faster. Tad got free access to InspectionXpert and validated that the software would help him balloon drawings and create reports faster. He was also concerned about security: “Ultimately I chose InspectionXpert because of the transparency. I knew exactly what I was getting, and who I was getting it from.”
With InspectionXpert, Tad can balloon his part drawings and create check sheets for the floor in 20 minutes– an 84% time savings from his old manual process. Tad and his coworker Kelli Entenman are using InspectionXpert to help them create control plans, check sheets, and PPAP Dimensional Results Reports.
Results
“If I hadn’t found a faster way to bubble, I would have lost my sanity, quit my job and just opened a lemonade stand in my hometown Hicksville, Ohio,” says Tad. For Tad, finding efficiency in his process wasn’t optional, it was critical to keeping up and ensuring that the company could continue to grow. By decreasing the amount of time Tad spends on paperwork, he is able to spend more time on the floor observing and improving processes, which results in lower defects. Ultimately, Tad and Kelli were able to improve the quality processes at Wieland Chase that made gains in their forging throughput yield.
About: Wieland Chase, a member of the global Wieland Group, is a leading brass rod manufacturer in the US located in Montpelier, Ohio.
Resources:
Free Access to InspectionXpert
Free PPAP Template
