Metrology needs more thought at a business level.

Metrology has the opportunity to unlock and sustain new productivity benefits. Current company initiatives such as lean manufacturing rely on good measurement data to feed the decision making process. Bad or variable data will confuse and disrupt effective decision making and therefore frustrate productivity improvements.

 “Measurement provides structure, removes chaos, reduces waste, ensures open and fair markets, supports precision where required and saves lives, money and time.”

(Measurement Matters - UK National Measurement Office, 2011)

 The UK currently has a ‘productivity puzzle’ that needs to be solved to sustain its economic growth, our trajectory slowing since 2007 relative to other countries. You may have invested heavily in skills relating to Total Quality Management and applied Lean and Agile initiatives.  But have you tried Metrology skills?

 The main barrier in respect to effective applied metrology and its subsequent measurement, is to tackle the under skilled application of metrology within manufacturing due to skills shortages. In addition, Senior Managers are losing touch with modern measurement procedures, processes and technologies causing barriers in business management. Even a typical medium sized manufacturing company captures thousands of dimensional measurements every day by a variety of employees mainly across Production and Quality. This data is then used to maintain process control and flow, but also to make critical business decisions when issues arise around the creation of scrap, rework or unplanned production downtime. Bad data, bad decisions. If good data it will sustain other key business skills such as new part introduction, quality, lean and agile productivity initiatives and prepare the business for smart manufacturing technologies and processes. 

Metrology skills play a part in various areas across a manufacturing businesses engineering employees but generally covering these streams of activity:

•  Goods inwards (supplier’s components or sub-assemblies, verified upon delivery)
• Setting of machines / processes (setting up for batch runs or after tool changes)
• First off and last off samples (often required by the customer as validation)
• Process control checks (key feature measurement to provide help control processes)
• Equipment validation (evaluating measurement equipment for fitness for purpose)
• Validation checks (measurements taken to confirm production measurements)
• New part introduction (measurement taken during R&D or initial set up)
• Investigation (measurement undertaken to establish causes of any issues in the above)

These measurement tasks are undertaken by a range of employees from Storepersons or goods inwards inspectors, machine tool setter / operators, Inspectors or Quality Engineers, Production / Manufacturing Engineers and even in smaller companies the Management team. All of these measurements are collected to provide data to be analysed as key process indicators and to raise alarms when issues occur, all have a direct impact upon productivity when they go awry. 

An example of how measurement can go wrong both at an operational level and managements lack of understanding of standards and specifications can be demonstrated by the French national railway. In 2014 2,000 new trains were ordered that when delivered were found to be too wide for the station platforms. An error in supply or design measured correctly and without causing question and missed by management. An error that went on to cost the French taxpayer €50 million to correct. (The Telegraph, 2014)

 This is an extreme example, but errors within the process of measurement are created every day by measurement variation. If both the measurement taker and the management decision maker do not understand that all measurements have uncertainty and clearly appreciate each other’s requirements, then micro versions of this error can occur daily, causing confusion and costing resources and money to resolve. Therefore, impacting productivity.

 By tackling both employee measurement skills and the understanding of metrology within the management team, you can unlock those elusive productivity benefits that those higher skills will reveal.

Employee skills has long been a challenge and evidenced over several government papers and initiatives to try to tackle a serious engineering skills shortage. Skills to support productivity include a broad range of underpinning technical engineering and business and process management skills in conjunction with general software and digital competence. Most of these have been tackled over the last two decades but Metrology has yet to catch up in both operational skills and management implementation.

Ian Wilcox