As manufacturers transition toward Industry 4.0 to speed up production cycles and accelerate their time to market, they nevertheless continue to face many challenges, particularly with respect to automating quality control.

Reducing costs drives the need for automated quality control

Automating quality control is indeed a compelling strategy for manufacturers to not only improve product quality, drive innovation, and address the manufacturing skills gap, but also to reduce direct quality control costs and the expensive ripple effect of poor quality or lack of conformance.

In fact, according to the American Society for Quality, quality-related issues cost manufacturers 15%–20% of sales revenue—with some going as high as 40%. Just think of all the quality control costs that can be incurred because of noncompliance:
• Rework and scrapping
• Production line downtimes
• Recalls and repairs
• Purchasing new materials
• Changes to the production planning to accommodate a new run
• Retesting

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