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Published 9/1/2021 | 10 MINUTE READ


DIGITAL PART INSPECTION SOFTWARE CREATES NEW BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES



Chick Machine overhauled its decades-old inspection process and landed new
clients that have propelled the growth of the company.

David Lyell

Associate Editor


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READ NEXT

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Every machinist at Chick Machine is an inspector. Machinist, Andrew Burd,
completes his part of the inspection process on the shop floor using one of the
mobile CMMs that the shop has added to its workflow. 

When Chick Machine landed a new aerospace contract that required inspection
documentation the shop had never produced before, it had little time to overhaul
its inspection department and put an end to handwritten inspection reports.

For over 50 years, Chick Machine of Butler, Pennsylvania, has provided parts for
an industrial laser company. The strength of the relationship meant that the
shop saw the same parts over and over for decades. This work built a healthy
business for the founder, Jim Chick, but ultimately meant that the machinists
internalized many inspection processes and were able to get by with rudimentary
checks as parts passed through their stations. This was until the ownership of
the shop changed hands. 




CHECK OUT THE MODERN MACHINE SHOP.... SHOP

Proudly sport the bold, iconic brand that started it all. Grease stains and
coolant blotches optional.

Visit Shop

 

Chick Machine is a large buyer of oxygen free copper for its laser parts. The
shop has produced these parts for decades and they are the foundation of its
business. 

In 2017 Bob Petrini became the majority owner of the shop following a a career
in finance and with experience as a minority owner of his employers in more
recent years. He decided it was time to gain controlling interest this time
around and purchased the shop when its founder, Jim Chick, retired. His business
experience and fresh eyes were a new start for Chick Machine, and he homed in on
a new focus, to grow and diversify the company. It wasn’t long before Bob
invited his son, Bobby Petrini, to join the team as the shop’s first
salesperson. Bobby had spent his career consulting for several different
manufacturing companies and leveraged his network to bring in new work soon
after he joined.

Everything appeared to be going well and the shop was growing quickly. However,
with every yes to a new job, the shop was wading deeper into advanced aerospace
work, something it had never done before. The parts started piling up and it
became evident that the quality control department was turning into a bottleneck
as the team there learned new certifications, inspection requirements and
documentation. The situation came to a head when one of the shop’s new clients
nearly walked away after a bad part run due to inspection problems. Chick
Machine had to overhaul the quality control department and its processes.





ASSEMBLING THE TEAM

Finding the right leader to lead change can be difficult. “I was going after
capabilities almost as hard as customers because we needed both,” Bobby says in
reference to his search for a quality manager. By fall of 2020, Bobby had a new
quality manager in place to manage the implementation of a new quality control
program at Chick Machine. The opportunity was built on a foundation of software
that the shop had already purchased, including a new ERP system from eci
JobBoss2 in 2019 and High QA quality management software in June of 2020. The
new manager was responsible for sorting out how to implement High QA's
Inspection Manager software and was given the runway to build out the quality
department as he saw fit.

 
 

The challenge the shop faced was not whether or not it could make good parts,
but whether or not it could document its work.

The road ahead was laden with challenges as the shop shook off many of the
inspection practices that the shop had developed and maintained over the years.
Some of the infrastructure was eliminated altogether, like the in-house database
that captured some information from some jobs. But other components involved
long-time employees. With the new inspection management software, the quality
control department was trained to create quality plans in High QA, a new and
very different process for some employees. And for many of the machinists on the
floor, inspection was no longer paper documentation with risk of inconsistency,
errors or missing measurements altogether if a machinist was confident in the
part. After all, “There are some legacy parts here that machinists have been
holding tolerances for since 1971 and those tolerances don’t appear on a
drawing.” a machinists says. Moving forward, all machinists will be directly
responsible for inspection through a living database that time stamps every
measurement. In a few short months, there were enough changes to inspection
procedures that a few employees even left the company.




> The last piece of the staffing puzzle was to hire somebody to balance the
> ambitious inspection goals the shop set out for itself and the hours the
> quality assurance department would be able to give to the sales team.

Moving forward, a new mantra was carried into every interview as the shop filled
vacant positions: “Machinists are inspectors first and machinists second.” And
to the surprise of some at the shop, many of the new recruits that joined the
company did so because they appreciated the highly integrated processes that the
shop created with High QA Inspection Manager. They were attracting seasoned
machinists that wanted to make quality parts and were already accustomed to
inspecting their work.

The last piece of the staffing puzzle was to hire somebody to balance the
ambitious inspection goals that the shop set out for itself and the hours that
the quality assurance department would be able to give to the sales team. The
solution was to hire the shop’s first engineer to work alongside the quality and
sales departments. Bobby quickly realized that with each contract he was trying
to win, the demands for inspection procedures were increasing as he moved deeper
and deeper into the aircraft and space contracts he was pursuing. With an
engineer on staff, the shop could analyze the parts, dive into the reference
documents and understand what would be required of the quality control
department before the shop took on a job. In the words of Bob and Bobby, this
was all part of “Winning the job before the job begins.”




> Converting the shop to a digital inspection management system didn’t feel like
> an option but a necessity. “We have to evolve this capability or we will be
> left behind,” Bobby says.


DATA ENTRY FOR ALL

Converting the shop to a digital inspection management system didn’t feel like
an option but a necessity. “We have to evolve this capability or we will be left
behind,” Bobby says. He knew that other shops had solved the inspection equation
and felt confident that digital management was the solution to the shop’s
bottlenecks. When speaking about the decision to purchase the shop's first seat
of the software, Bob says, “We liked auto ballooning and we also liked the data
capture and reporting.” But these features were just the beginning; the
capabilities of the software were far reaching and changed the culture of the
shop.

IM Explorer is the data entry module of High QA. At Chick Machine, every
workstation has a desktop computer that interfaces with the software for
inputting inspection data, as shown here by Koby Woods, machinist. 

In the past, the quality department was the last stop for parts before they
shipped to the customer. Leaving inspection to the very end of production meant
that too often entire runs of parts were scrapped because of a single feature
that fell out of tolerance. It was obvious to many stakeholders that this could
be solved by increasing the number of checks that occurred during the various
machining and finishing operations, but in the past the shop didn’t have
detailed, formal inspection plans to handle that kind of process. 




Every machinist is an inspector. The expectation is that if you are making
parts, you’re capturing inspection data.  

Now, with High QA Inspection Manager, every job has an inspection plan and every
machinist has a workstation equipped with a computer that interfaces with that
plan so that the part follows the plan through every operation. On the shop
floor, the interface is called IM Explorer and acts as the data entry
application for machinists. This part of the software runs across the shop’s
network and can be used on an inexpensive desktop computer or tablet with a
touch interface. At Chick Machine, most users have a keyboard and mouse to
interact with IM Explorer. This interface accepts data from connected gages,
calipers and other measuring tools once they are properly assigned.

Many of the machinists use the interface constantly as they refer to the print
and inspection operations for their assigned jobs. The convenience of a computer
at the bench meets the needs of operators in unexpected ways as well. Everyone
in the shop is working from the same drawing from the same source, so there is
no longer worry about notes scribbled on the side of drawings or operators
hanging on to old revisions that have outdated instructions. As one operator put
it, “On paper, a lot of fine print becomes illegible after its been handled, so
I’m able to zoom in on a drawing now and see every detail.”





STICK TO THE PLAN

Once a part drawing leaves the engineering room, the quality department imports
it into the software. The automatic ballooning feature identifies dimensions and
their associated tolerance and prompts the programmer to start building out the
inspection plan. In the shop, an employee dedicated to the role interprets the
automatic ballooning to make decisions as to when the dimension will be checked,
how it will be checked and how often the part run will be sampled. “From a
machinist’s perspective, there’s less thought in the figuring out of these
details and instead they are focusing on making the part,” Bobby says. All of
this work is done in the Inspection Manager module of High QA.

Once a drawing is imported into Inspection Manager, the software will
automatically read the drawing and David McPherson, a Quality Engineer, can
start assigning inspection instructions to the machinists on the shop floor.  

When speaking with machinists on the floor, it was clear that the inspection
plan can have layers of checks that prove to be useful. If a feature is assigned
to one machining process, the machining process that comes after it might affect
the previous, so the plan provides instructions to the operator to take the
measurement again. This in turn unites machinists in different areas of the shop
and ties their work together in real time, as measurements are recorded.



 

On the shop floor, a machinist follows the inspection plan that the quality
control department created by working through a list of measurements. The data
can be keyed in manually or input through a connected measuring device. 

This has created a culture where the concept of peer review is intuitive and
practiced often for first article inspections (FAI) on items like tooling that
can be checked with equipment at the bench. The shop does send aerospace and
other complex parts to the quality control department for FAI. This is a major
shift from the days when parts and inspection documents would land on the desk
in the quality control department and the shop would discover out-of-spec parts
far too late in the process.



Read: "Soft" Automation is Long Overdue





LEVERAGE THE DATA

Now that the shop has used the inspection software for almost a year, it has
found that the reporting it offers to customers is becoming ingrained in the
culture of the shop. “The standardization has helped every customer. We tried
offering reporting to some customers and not others, but it got too confusing on
the floor. Full reporting is good for everybody, so that’s what we deliver,” Bob
Petrini says. In providing a full inspection report for every customer and
running every project through Inspection Manager, the shop is creating a single
database that is home to every project. So if the parts are ordered again, the
shop can leverage their past work and reuse the quality assurance plan. 

It was a single customer that drove Chick Machine to overhaul its entire
inspection process. The solution involved changes to every aspect of
manufacturing inside the shop — every employee, every workstation, every piece
of documentation had to be overhauled. The result is a shop that is better
prepared to tackle new work. “We built a quality system and a production system
to serve this project and now we are capable of a lot more.” Bobby says. Because
the shop has documentation to prove its success with inspection, the company now
finds it easier than ever to make new sales. “Bringing real inspection reports
instead of PowerPoint slides makes selling to new customers much easier,” Bobby
says.




For aerospace parts, the quality control department will perform first article
inspection in the climate controlled office on a large bed CMM. Jeff Sauers, CMM
Programmer, makes adjustments to a part he has worked on. 







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