Manufacturers today must grapple with meeting a host of international standards. Regardless of whether a company does business locally or globally, it has to submit early design and manufacturing reports, such as a First Article Inspection (FAI) report, inspection report or ballooned drawing (where dimensions for inspections are drawn in a balloon or bubble shape).

These reports measure the property and geometry of a product before it is built – and are critical for organizations who must meet the stringent requirements and safety regulations of the transportation and mobility, aerospace and defense, energy, process and utilities and life sciences industries.

A recent survey of CAD users found that while many are creating FAIs, inspection reports, or ballooned drawings, just a small percentage are using software for their creation. Instead, users are manually entering data into ballooned engineering drawings and hand-keying inspection reports into Excel, an error-prone process.

Automated inspection app facilitates creation of inspection documents

Today, Dassault Systèmes announces the release of an automated inspection tool called SolidWorks Inspection. This new ap will help manufacturers by completely automating the creation of inspection documents, which are now required in many industries for regulatory compliance.

With the SOLIDWORKS Inspection application, companies can quickly re-use existing design data and content to create highly accurate inspection reports, such as AS91002 or PPAP forms, helping to accelerate the time to regulatory approval.

With SolidWorks Inspection, users are given multiple ways to automatically enter values directly into an inspection report. SOLIDWORKS Inspection also helps eliminate errors and inconsistencies that come from entering data by hand. Using this application enables quality inspectors to easily identify problematic parts or manufacturing processes. By regularly creating inspection reports and conducting in-process inspections, scrap costs are reduced, product quality is improved and problematic machines or calibration issues can be detected earlier.

SOLIDWORKS Inspection consists of a stand-alone application and a SolidWorks add-in that enables users to leverage their legacy data, regardless of whether they are SOLIDWORKS files, PDFs or TIFFs.

Extended functionality offered in Professional edition

The SOLIDWORKS Inspection Professional edition extends SOLIDWORKS Inspection capabilities by providing users with multiple ways to enter measured values – manually typing them in, using a digital caliper or importing CMM results.

The dimensions in the drawing are automatically highlighted in green, red and yellow to instantly provide information on which dimensions are within the design’s tolerance budget. This helps ensure parts are within specification for perfect fit and function, as well as improved quality and reliability.

For more information on SolidWorks Inspection, which can be purchased through SolidWorks resellers, read more here.

Barb Schmitz