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Benefits to UK Industry

In high value, high complexity, low volume manufacturing environment the quality of items produced is paramount.

Many industrial environments continue to rely on expert inspection, often by individuals with significant experience in the manufacturing process. These individuals are of great value to the business for their knowledge, but they are also bottlenecks, as the knowledge remains in their heads. As these individuals inevitably age and retire, the knowledge of past problems, and what to look out for are lost, leading to an erosion of product and quality knowledge.

Machine vision systems provide a way of automating the inspection, allowing the experienced inspector to focus on defining the problem, sharing their knowledge and training the algorithms and reducing the impact of the individual as a bottleneck. A secondary benefit is the capture of additional data and the opportunities this creates to make predictions and avoid errors. Businesses that can improve quality and avoid skills erosion can avoid cost-of-non-quality and leverage performance improvements.