The engineering team at FLIR leveraged Instrumental’s Manufacturing AI and Data Platform to accelerate their New Product Introduction (NPI) on the third-generation FLIR ONE and FLIR ONE Pro. The team needed to vet a new design, bring up a new factory, and lower costs — all while keeping the NPI schedule on track. Instrumental’s manufacturing analytics and visual inspection helped FLIR to meet their goals by identifying assembly and design issues and accelerating failure analysis. Read the full case study here.
FLIR used Instrumental to:
- Confirm the configuration of a key part already built into units, saving time and effort immediately.
- Speed up issue discovery and failure analysis: FLIR used the system to discover places where components were being misassembled or were falling out of alignment and track build progress.
- Extend remote access: At FLIR in Santa Barbara, multiple cross-functional teams took advantage of the enhanced failure analysis capabilities provided by the Instrumental System. At multiple times during development, four separate conference rooms filled with different parts of the development team were working with images from the Instrumental System.
- Catch and fix problems like improperly fastened screws, PCB issues, unsnapped components, and part contamination.
“Without the immediate data collection and subsequent analysis, we would not have found and solved the issues on time. Some of the issues we may never have found. I am very happy to have Instrumental on the line.” — MARCEL TREMBLAY, DIRECTOR OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, FLIR
The team at FLIR brought their new product and their new factory into mass production with increased speed, lower cost, and higher quality. Throughout development, the Instrumental Platform and manufacturing analytics gave the team what they needed to find, fix, and monitor issues. With data stored on every assembly, the data record was used to immediately show pictures to the factory, so they knew exactly what to address. Travel to the factory was reduced by 75% for some of the FLIR development team because of the Instrumental stations.
A misassembled screw on the left unit allowed a bracket to be loose, leading to reliability concerns. FLIR engineers used Instrumental to identify and solve issues like these quickly.
Instrumental’s tools help hardware teams catch defects early during development and transition seamlessly into production. Get a demo today!
