Manufacturing is a very simple business. Here the owner buys the raw material or parts to manufacture a finished product. However, it’s a risky business in terms of selling the finished products. Supply too much and you flood the market, causing a drop in price and a drop in profits. By not meeting demand, the customer may go elsewhere with a drop in sales for the manufacturer.
Most of the time probably the biggest factor to dominate the market is Quality Control. It plays a big role in successful manufacturing. The manufacturer will need to keep a close eye on the quality of the product from beginning to end, with many tests along the way. If mistakes happen, the long-term consequences may be serious. Quality isn’t just about offering a product or service that exceeds the standard, but it’s also about the reputation you gain for consistently delivering a customer experience that is above and beyond.
It was the topic of one of our webinars. Quality!! and how ML/AI can help in controlling it. The recording of the webinar is not available on the public platforms so if you wish to get the recorded video, you can go to this link. It was a very basic introduction to AI/ML though. The Machinex data wizards in Knoldus are keen on solving even more problems in this domain. You can join our slack channel to interact with us as well as can get more update on the different activities that we are doing. Here is the link for that.
Now let’s come back to quality. If precision and consistency are the problems to maintain quality, then AI/ML may be the answer. An AI or ML model installed in a robot arm or an IOT device will consistently and repeatedly follow exact processes and workflows with minuscule deviation, which provides optimum conditions for study or analysis, which ensures consistency and predictable quality. It is not really possible for a human to repeat the same movement over and over again for many hours with exactly the same precision. However, a robot arm or an IOT device with a camera can be used for non-destructive testing and guaranteeing the quality of your products. It can objectively identify and pinpoint defective or faulty parts.
Now for many small businesses, Robot arms might be very expensive deals. However, just like how the Supercomputer powers can be gotten through cloud computing, These robot arms can be replaced with IoT. Of course, I am not here to debate all the scenarios, it’s up to the manufacturer what would be more convenient for him. But the main point is the intelligence part. How do we detect faulty pieces or in AI/ML terms, how are we going to classify different defects upon getting the image? Well, the world is moving really fast towards adopting AI and ML and hence its tools are becoming more mature and more powerful day by day. Tools like Tensorflow, Pytorch are flying high right now as many people around the world have started adopting it. Usage of Convolutional neural network with Tensorflow is giving power to the solutions to image classification immensely. There is a technical blog series that I have recently started on Convolutional neural network and its usage. Apart from that you can get a lot more updated AI/ML related blogs in blog.knoldus.com with prefix Machinex.
Now we have seen how AI/ML can help us with when it comes to manufacturing and quality at a nutshell. We will continue by giving you more detail about how AI and ML can help you grow the business of manufacturing in the future. So stay tuned for more.
