Looking for an event to attend where you get up-to-date information on the latest hardware and software? Try attending a user conference of a prospective vendor. You might be pleasantly surprised at how much you learn. Although typically set up for existing users of a company’s products, these events are often open to potential customers, sometimes for a small fee.
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There’s a good reason to attend these events. They are probably the only place where attendees can see, first-hand, how well a product lives up to its marketing hype. Sure, there’s always the usual sales pitch for a company’s latest products worked into the demonstration—after all, an existing customer is more likely to buy a new product from his current vendor than a new one. But the overarching message at user conferences is how that company’s technology is working in the real world.
I recently attended the Measurement Innovation conference, a technology conference/user-group meeting for Capture3D close to its headquarters in Costa Mesa, California. If you have never been to a company-hosted technology event, this one is a perfect example of their value to prospective buyers. When you have attendees and presenters from Boeing, Nissan, Volkswagen, Chrysler, and NASA giving case studies, as was the case at this event, you have gone way beyond your typical sales pitch and its strategically placed name dropping, and into the meatier realm of of existing customers giving you the real benefits of a product line.
And of course, the Q&A from a user audience is much more pointed than what you might get at an expo. Questions often begin with, “Have you guys addressed the issue of…”
Honestly, I would rather attend a dozen user-groups than one expo. And not just because the food is better (although that does help).
I only attended the Capture3D conference for one day, but here were two excellent takeaways.
3D inspection for tool and die
Very often when I think of test and measurement, I think of product inspection. Perhaps that’s because of my background—electronics manufacturing. You build a part or device, and you inspect it. Often when I get excited by some new product it’s from that perspective; how it can help make inspection easier, faster, and more accurate on the shop floor.
To tell the truth, even though it makes perfect sense, I hadn’t given a lot of thought to 3D inspection for the parts that make the parts—say, a sheet-metal die for a large, stamped product. One of Capture3D’s customers speaking at the user conference was Bruce Williams Jr., head of die and press shop quality at Chrysler. For Chrysler, die development and verification moves along much quicker using 3D scanning. The number of “quality loops" is drastically reduced when a die can be accurately measured and verified to its design intent early in the process, Williams says. Keep in mind, sheet metal dies for large automobile panels are huge—and expensive—so you really do want to get it right the first time.
At Chrysler, 3D die inspection is done at all steps of the die-making process: after casting, after various machine steps, and obviously, on the first part to come off the press, using 3D scanning to verify that the stamped part meets spec, thus indirectly verifying the accuracy of the die.
For a more complete description of the benefits of 3D scanning for die inspection, watch my interview with Williams, below.
Robotic scanning
Robotic scanning is another interesting addition to 3D scanning, and Capture3D has several robotic-based solutions—the ATOS ScanBox, for instance. In simplest terms, a robotic arm (e.g., a Fanuc) moves a 3D scanner around the object to be scanned, taking the human element out of the measurement. Not only is robotic scanning more repeatable, it’s also faster, and it frees up skilled personnel to spend time on more value-adding activities than scanning.
Although a robotic solution is elegant, some people may shy away from it because of the extra cost. After all, an operator, in the short term anyway, is much less expensive than a robot. However, in an interview with Jeremy Comment, a senior CMM programmer with Mann+Hummel USA, it was obvious that the return on investment (ROI) can be quite fast. In his case, the ROI was more than $200,000 in seven months. Before robotic scanning, the company had to outsource manual scanning to free up personnel for more skilled functions, such as programming. For Mann+Hummel the savings came from being able to eliminate that outsourcing, even as its demand increased by 300 percent.
My complete interview with Comment is below.
This was just a fraction of what came out of a three-day user conference. There were also case studies from Boeing and North American Eagle (those are the guys who are trying to break the world land-speed record… Mach 1), loaded with the kind of information you don’t get in a sales call or a trade show.
My suggestion is that next time you are considering the purchase of a pricey bit of software or hardware, find out if the company whose product you are interested in has a user conference. In particular you want to know if it involves case studies from other users and not just training. Even if you have to pay to attend, you will walk away with a lot more confidence in your decision to buy or not buy.
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