Creaform recently announced its latest additions to its R-Series lineup, including a new MetraSCAN-R BLACK | Elite HD with improved performance as well as a new edition of VXelements designed for long-term support (LTS). This state-of-the-art set of solutions also includes a new version of VXscan-R module specially made to accommodate custom automated 3D scanning cell layouts, while keeping the ease of use of its digital twin programming software.
Key Features and Benefits:
Speed and repeatability: MetraSCAN-R BLACK Ι Elite HD offers an optimized field of view for increased performance levels during challenging applications, such as 3D measurements on sheet metal parts.
Ideal for the automotive market: With its 69 laser lines and 3,000,000 measurements/s, this specialized 3D scanner is perfect for parts with many edges, trims, and boundaries.
Personalized solution: The intuitive VXscan-R software module makes it possible to include the custom features of your 3D scanning CMM (enclosure, robot base, turntable, etc.) for fast and easy programming.
Long-term support: Exclusive to the R-series products, the new VXelements LTS version extends the period of software maintenance while also increasing software robustness and dependability by limiting the number of new feature releases.
Operational simplicity: With its compatibility with major 3D metrology software, off-line programming, and seamless integration within any production workflow, the R-Series is accessible to all, regardless of the expertise or experience level.
“In the quest to gain efficiency, manufacturers require QC solutions that can adapt to their workflow and environment, while being easy to use. For better decision-making to get better quality parts, they also need fast and precise data,” explains Jérôme-Alexandre Lavoie, Product Manager at Creaform. “With these latest innovations, there has never been a better time to easily move to automation.”
Creaform recently announced the opening of a new office and innovation center in Houston, Texas.
At the new location, customers will be able to benchmark the full portfolio of Creaform portable and automated 3D metrology solutions for a variety of applications, including quality control, NDT surface inspections and product design. The site features a fully-automated CUBE-R 3D scanning CMM and a technology center for seminars, workshops and one-on-one demonstrations.
The new center complements Creaform’s existing US footprint with greater geographic and multi-industry coverage, provides a centralized hub for regional operations, and anchors its US-based metrology services and support teams. Initially founded and headquartered in Canada, Creaform has steadily grown US operations through regional staff placements and a California office established in 2015.
“The United States continues to be a focal point for Creaform. Our technologies provide solutions for manufacturing, automotive, energy and aerospace industries from coast to coast,” explains Jarrod Schmidt, National Sales Manager for Creaform USA. “Texas is a growing hub for technological innovation and offers great customer outreach opportunities for our team across the United States. Creaform now will be able to more effectively provide support and expertise for each region’s unique manufacturing and quality control challenges.”
We are excited to announce the VX Elements Platform Version 9 is now available. Several new features as well as existing feature enhancements were developed to provide significant improvements. Whether in VXscan, VXinspect, VXmodel, or VXscan-R, experts and beginners alike will discover exciting, new, and improved tools that will make their work much easier, faster, and profitable.
In a desire to perfect VXelements and the synergy between the software and hardware, each VX module was upgraded to meet the ever-changing needs of the users and today’s constantly evolving industries. Here are some of the important advantages of this latest version:
New – VXelements viewer: Used for data sharing, this free version of the platform will enable customers or colleagues outside the team to visualize the data firsthand, making collaborative projects simpler and faster.
Smart resolution: Available for the latest generation of Creaform 3D scanners, this new feature allows users to generate scans from multiple resolution levels to better reproduce details, edges and high curvatures. Higher levels of resolution can be automatically created in several ways: by software intelligence; by being triggered from the scanner; and by being generated from a selection on the mesh or from a template.
VXmodel: With the addition of the Flatten mesh, the Extrude boundaries and the Extend boundaries features, this module will enable users to carry out post-treatment operations on 3D scan data simply and effortlessly.
VXinspect: Quick inspection tools – such as One-click entitycreation, new construction methods for geometrical entities, and new reporting capabilities – are just a few of the improvements that will add simplicity and flexibility to the 3D inspection software.
VXscan-R: A new and improved Surface feature combined with the Smart resolution feature will make it easier for users to generate robot trajectories and get the most out of their automated quality control solutions.
With Blacksmith, X7 is the Only Industrial Grade Printer with In Process-Part Verification, enabling self-correcting capabilities to print in-spec parts right off the printer bed.
Get to market faster with confidence in your parts by streamlining the quality control process for 3D printed parts on the X7. By scanning parts while they print, the X7 is the only industrial-grade FFF 3D printer with in-process part verification.
Get Reliable Parts Right Off the Print Bed
Get AI capabilities with Blacksmith. The software is a subscription feature available through Eiger, the additive manufacturing software for Markforged. It scans, measures, and compares dimensional accuracy data of printed parts to their design files — giving manufacturers reliable parts right off the print bed.
Benefits of Blacksmith Software:
Verified prints off the print bed — Get known good parts at the point of fabrication. Generate, compare, and automatically store quality reports for any part printed with Blacksmith.
Accessible and integrated workflow — Integrate regular part inspection into your additive workflow with a single click. No specialized training or complicated inspection equipment needed.
Confirmed fleet conformity — Print consistent, predictable parts across a global fleet. Remove any headaches about part variability.
Controlled additive quality process — Establish a standardized process for measuring additively manufactured parts.
Expand additive applications — Transition business critical parts from traditional manufacturing to additive manufacturing with increased confidence in part quality.
Special promotion for X7 Gen 1 Customers:
Get One (1) Complimentary Turbo Print Upgrade with purchase of 1 or 3 Year Blacksmith License
The upgrade kit includes hardware and software components and is available for purchase for $4,900 starting March 18th.
In this video, Frank Thomas walks viewers through the steps a Quality Control team would take to inspect a new shiny metal part generated from a 3D Printer. The process uses a 3D Scanner to inspect the part and make sure it meets tolerance and part requirements.
Using a Creaform HandySCAN BLACK, Frank fully acquires a 3D Scan of a part using a turntable to assist with the full imaging. He saves the scan in a .STL format, which is a common format that can be used to import into CAD systems and others. In this instance, the .STL file was imported into Polyworks Inspector software to generate the full inspection report.
As more and more industrial and manufacturing organizations digitalize their processes, many are turning their focus to quality initiatives. To evaluate the level of industrial deployment, impact, and effort, LNS Research conducted a global survey in 2019 around a set of quality use cases, asking executives and management in a variety of organizational roles about their readiness for industrial transformation and quality maturity.
Their report, “Quality 4.0: The Quality Innovation Foundry,” categorizes and defines the use cases and examines the state of industrial transformation and quality efforts in the real world.
The Point of IX and Quality 4.0
LNS explains industrial transformation—also IX, Digital Transformation, or smart manufacturing—as “a coordinated approach to leverage digital technologies to create step-change improvement in industrial operations.” The results for those leading companies who have undertaken an IX strategy that includes a Quality 4.0 initiative are impressive:
Achieve 90th percentile performance in quality and manufacturing metrics
Seven times more likely to have high support for quality from the IT organization
Three times more likely to implement any given quality process with technology
Have aggressively adopted use cases within quality but also those that extend the quality focus outside the quality function and organization
Are significantly more likely to adopt voice of the customer use cases, which represents a monumental change for quality and dramatically impacts their organization
Focus on 8 of 33 use cases that deliver the most improvement for the least cost/effort.
Quality 4.0 is all about the digitalization of quality management in order to improve quality monitoring and outcomes, as well as the impact of digitalization on people, processes, and product. LNS further explains:
“At its core, Quality 4.0 is quality data enhanced with other data sources such as manufacturing, machine sensors, supplier management, and product lifecycle data, to derive new analytical insights to be used across the entire enterprise.”
The Challenges
The value of implementing Quality 4.0 initiatives is the ability to realize improved quality, costs, efficiency, market share, and brand recognition. Like any major organizational change, there are challenges associated with accomplishing Quality 4.0 efforts:
Poor quality data impeding success
A lack of engagement and support by the IT department
A lack of an enterprise system that captures not only data but context for that data, such as an enterprise quality management system (EQMS)
The old idea that the role of Quality and its expertise is siloed into a single group’s function
This silo concept creates another big organizational issue that was highlighted in the survey: LNS found organizations face hurdles in achieving quality objectives because they view quality as only a department and not a responsibility.
Therefore, it is no surprise that in more than half of the organizations surveyed, quality teams were unaware and not involved in broad, enterprise-wide quality initiatives.
In fact, LNS reports that the most fundamental process change organizations can make is moving quality from a standalone process executed by a low-profile department to a core part of the corporation’s fabric—and to do so by changing the basic role of the quality team to make it core to the organization’s business.
The Quality 4.0 Survey Results
LNS Research tracks (33) Quality 4.0 use cases, divided into six categories. They asked survey respondents not only if they tracked specific manufacturing and quality metrics, but also to rate performance and recent improvements for the measure. The following highlight the 6 categories where progress was being made in Quality 4.0 initiatives:
Digital Voice of the Consumer: This initiative helps organizations understand customers’ perception of products and quality, and is usually the easiest one to implement and measure. Statistical customer complaint analysis is most commonly deployed from this category, while online benchmarking analysis is identified as the most impactful. The percentage of survey respondents implemented:
Online marketplace benchmarking 22%
Online marketplace semantic analysis 27%
Social media sentiment analysis 23%
Statistical warranty analytics 24%
Machine learning/AI warranty analytics 22%
Statistical customer complaint analysis 31%
Machine learning/AI customer complaint signal detection 22%
Connected Supply Chain: A category that LNS has found offers the greatest impact on operational metrics. Many organizations start in this area. The six use cases have already been implemented by 21-34% of companies, and each yielded an average of 31% improvement on the quality and manufacturing metrics. The percentage of survey respondents implemented:
Real-time supplier operations visibility 24%
Predictive supplied good variance reduction 27%
Inspection optimization 34%
Multi-tiered supply chain traceability 34%
Prescriptive edge analytics 21%
Predictive critical parameter optimization 20%
Connected Operations: Mostly predictive efforts, such as predictive customer experience and predictive end product variance reduction. On average, the six use cases in this category deliver as much value as customer experience use cases, but they are more effort-intensive. The percentage of survey respondents implemented:
Predictive Asset maintenance 32%
Predictive in-process variance reduction 19%
Predictive end-product variance reduction 22%
Predictive in-service performance 27%
Predictive customer experience 28%
Inspection optimization 25%
Connected Worker: Allows companies to improve worker competency and compliance, while also accelerating the availability, accuracy, and effectiveness of insights received and acted upon. Remote operations centers are the example most actively piloted, though not widely deployed yet, likely due to it representing the biggest effort. The percentage of survey respondents implemented:
Connected Product: Represents the underlying vision of Industry 4.0 and IoT, where manufacturers increasingly connect their products to the internet to provide insight about actual use and performance and enable more proactive service. Performance monitoring is the most widely implemented of all 33 use cases. The percentage of survey respondents implemented:
Performance monitoring 30%
Predictive maintenance 25%
Early Failure detection/recall 20%
Remote diagnostics 13%
Prescriptive service 11%
Robotic Process Automation: RPA is a core tool to enable the reengineering of business processes that’s at the heart of IX. Of the three use cases in the category, audit data extraction is the one with the greatest attention—and a low implementation effort however, the impact of the use case is mixed, without significantly higher quality or manufacturing metrics so far. The percentage of survey respondents implemented:
Audit data extraction 31%
Root cause suggestion 20%
Predictive routing 27%
Quality 4.0 Findings
LNS found three major results around Quality 4.0 initiatives:
Positive Impact to the Enterprise. Use case implementations have a positive correlation with more than just quality. Virtually all of the 33 use cases “meaningfully improve both quality and manufacturing performance,” delivering an impact across the enterprise. That validates a core tenant of Quality 4.0, that quality is the responsibility of the whole organization and has an impact enterprise-wide.
Continuous Performance Improvements. The second finding is that the more use cases a company adopts, the better it performs in quality and manufacturing.
A Holistic View of Quality Enterprise-wide. The third finding addresses the effort for result, contending that expanding the traditional idea of quality to include the voice of the customer—through customer experience use cases—delivers the greatest improvement and provides the greatest return.
To get more information about specific use cases, the outcomes, and how Quality 4.0 can transform your organization, download the LNS Research report.
Or, let’s discuss how we can help you implement Quality 4.0 initiatives with the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. The platform will support many of the Quality 4.0 use cases identified in this report, and help keep the larger enterprise process well-managed and tracked in your organization.
