How Hardware-Agnostic Quality Software Empowers Supplier Quality

Universal Metrology Software Gives Your Suppliers the Power of Choice

Giving your supply chain the ability to choose whichever CMM, Arm, or device, or a mix of devices, helps streamline your quality 

Supplier quality is key to good products. Suppliers are often put in a precarious position of needing to meet stringent demands by their higher-tier customers and OEMs. This makes the relationship and communication between customer and supplier essential to receiving good parts in a timely fashion. What does that mean, and how does this have anything to do with quality software?

OEMs and Tier 1 manufacturers want to make sure that parts sent from suppliers meet their criteria. This is often done by standardizing quality software for inspection, measurement, and reporting. There are a lot of software systems in the market, and just as many different hardware vendors for quality tools like CMMs, hand gages, measurement arms, and scanners. A lot of manufacturers of specific hardware require that their software be used alongside their equipment. This allows them to set up seamless and smooth connections, and create a controlled ecosystem. In the market, however, this causes a swath of problems.

Metrologic software allows simulation, programming, and more for your devices, allowing you to use any brand CMM, Arm, or device

Let’s be honest, if you’re an OEM, you aren’t your supplier’s only customer. Most suppliers have a number of customers to stay busy with orders, and each customer has different requirements. The cost of purchasing and maintaining measurement equipment and software for each customer can become burdensome. You see this often with CAD systems too, where suppliers are forced to train in two, three, or even four different CAD platforms to open and work with the models and designs sent by their customers. This also happens in inspection. Having multiple inspection software systems then requires matched hardware, as many inspection programs only work with their paired devices.

QDM offers a CAD and device agnostic SPC platform, automatically collecting quality data from any device

At the end of the day, this leaves a supplier with multiple brands of inspection devices; multiple CAD platforms; and having to juggle learning, maintaining, and using all of these different systems to support their customers.

Hardware- and CAD-agnostic quality software allows your suppliers to use any device they have. If they’ve collected an eclectic bunch of CMMs and measurement arms from different vendors — because of past projects, sales, mergers, and other circumstances — a hardware-agnostic inspection software will allow them to use one program for any and all of their devices while supplying you, their customer, with a standard report and data set that you can quickly use to validate supplier part quality.

Combining Metrologic and DCS software provides a complete end-to-end Metrology solution - use it all or just pieces to start

Hardware-agnostic software also allows for smoother communication. By providing measurement plans and inspection programs through an agnostic program, all of your suppliers can use the same plans to measure and inspect without either the supplier or the OEM having to convert to other systems or create multiple plans. This reduces version issues, streamlines the process, and standardizes the process across the entire supply chain. A more streamlined process is less complicated which means far fewer chances of error.

Find out more ways to leverage hardware-agnostic quality software with Metrologic and DCS at IMTS Booth #135716 in the Quality Pavilion or online at www.3dcs.com/imts2022, and get a free quality review to see how your supplier quality can be streamlined.