Inspection planning for customer-driven manufacturing environments with modular inspection stations

Customer-driven manufacturing environments experience frequent changes in product design which complicates the planning of inspection station layout, for minimal profit erosion. Modular inspection systems have been researched to minimize the implementation costs of inspection stations. This paper presents a solution to achieving low quality costs by considering the location and configuration of the researched modular inspection stations within a customer-driven manufacturing environment. A model was derived to minimize the Cost of Quality metric for a given set of customer requirements and inspection station configurations. The results suggested by the model were simulated and compared to the performance of the 100% and 0% inspection allocation strategies. The performance of each strategy was largely dependent on the reliability of each process involved with the assembly of the product.