If you have managed a production team for any amount of time, it is important for you to have at least a rudimentary understanding of 3D scanning. While you probably have members of your team who specialize in this area, it’s imperative for you as a decision maker to understand a little about the elements of contract inspection that are happening in your manufacturing process. Having a good grasp of these aspects will make you much more valuable as a leader and allow you to make more informed decisions concerning your production.
A simple explanation of 3D digitizing is that it is a way to map out the many surface coordinates of an object. Each one of these X,Y, and Z coordinates are called “points” and all of them together are called a “point cloud”. The point cloud data is often stored as simply text values, or sometimes in another format called STL, which is a representation of this data in a polygonal mesh. This information is the basis for many different types of products that must be manufactured, and it’s also very useful in reverse engineering.
Using 3D imaging to obtain this sort of data can be a really smart move for any manufacturing company. First off, it’s very useful in your research and development phase and when utilized, can speed up the time in which it takes you to ultimately get your product to market. In today’s highly competitive business environment, this is key to being a successful organization. If you’re a smaller manufacturer with a more customized or limited production, then digitizing can help you in the area of quality control and uniformity. Reverse engineering processes are also benefited greatly from 3D digitizing as it simplifies much of the measuring process and provides you with very useful data that’s easy to understand.
One great thing about some companies is that they can provide all of these services on-site through use of portable coordinate measuring machines. You can contract them to come in and perform all of your digitizing needs right at your facility, under your supervision. This can be beneficial as it allows your engineers to be privy to the data as its being collected, rather than after the fact and lowering the accuracy of results. However you choose to have your data collected though, it’s a good idea to consider how this can positively impact your overall manufacturing process.
