"If you need to capture data or images to help automate, streamline, and error-proof any process, we’ll make that happen"

Using DPM to Streamline and Error-Proof Manufacturing Processes

Feature article by: Sandia Harrison, Director of Marketing, FPE Automation, Inc. 

Every manufacturer is under pressure to be as lean as possible and create more efficient and accurate processes. At the end of the day, it’s all about ensuring high-quality and profitable production. But achieving ideal production is the real challenge, and it’s particularly difficult if you’re still relying too much on the human eye or human labor at certain key points in your production processes.

This is why direct part marks, or DPMs, have become commonplace as a way to help automate and streamline manufacturing processes and eliminate human error with machine-driven efficiency and accuracy.

 

DPMs are barcodes or other identifying marks stamped directly onto a component, part, subassembly, or assembly. When they’re used with fixed industrial scanners or machine vision sensors that are placed at strategic points along production lines, DPMs can be scanned and read automatically as they move along, even on high-speed conveyors.

 

This means anything with a DPM can be automatically identified, tracked, traced, and even inspected as it moves through production. It all happens with machine automation that enables efficiency and accuracy that are impossible with the human eye.

 

Fixed scanners or machine vision cameras can scan or read DPMs to do everything from detect the presence of items to count, validate, and inspect them. The results can then be used to trigger automated exception alerts, route and sort parts or products, and conduct DPM-based assembly checks to ensure the correct parts are included in each assembly.

 

Using this approach, you can exponentially speed up, automate, and error-proof processes without relying on visual checks or inspections with the human eye. In fact, using Zebra fixed scanners and machine vision sensors, you can read and decode DPMs as well as 1D and 2D barcodes on high-speed lines, even from long range, from multiple sides, and at difficult angles. Zebra’s devices can capture as many as 16 scans or images, each with different settings—all from a single trigger event.

 

You can also expand further into automation by using Zebra fixed scanners and machine vision sensors to perform a wide range of tasks such as label quality inspection, where you can scan 1D or 2D barcodes to check dates and lot codes, check for label presence/absence, and inspect label content using scans and optical character recognition (OCR).

 

You can also use Zebra’s machine vision sensors to conduct sophisticated image analysis, to detect and recognize defects before they become an issue, to detect foreign material or contamination, and even to inspect packaging.

 

When you rely on workers and the human eye to perform some of these sensitive and difficult tasks, it puts a big burden on workers while opening up many possibilities of error stemming from a momentary lapse of attention, eye strain, fatigue, and other factors. By setting up an automated system to do this, you can create around-the-clock processes that operate more efficiently and eliminate risks of error. Then, you can re-assign workers to more value-added production tasks.

Ultimately, the potential opportunities extend far beyond DPMs and production processes and even into robotics, where machine vision sensors can be used in conjunction with robotic arms to move parts, assemblies, or products from one line to another. Or, scanners and machine vision sensors can be used to automatically detect and route finished goods along the correct conveyors for robotic palletization.

In the end, whether you’re using DPMs or barcodes and Zebra’s industrial automation devices for something fairly simple or extremely sophisticated, it’s relatively quick and easy to get a solution up and running.

At FPE Automation, we have a dedicated facility where we design, test, validate, and build industrial automation solutions for our customers. With Zebra’s remarkably powerful but simple devices and software, we can configure a system that will do whatever you need it to do.

We have an unofficial motto; “What you do is what you do.” If you need to capture data or images to help automate, streamline, and error-proof any process, we’ll make that happen.

We use Zebra’s technology to capture and help automatically analyze and inspect the information you need, and we can send the images, data, and inspection results to any system you need, using a secure, cloud-based approach. It all happens faster and without the eye strain, fatigue, or risk of error that comes with relying on the human eye.

If streamlining and error-proofing more of your production processes would be a boost to your business, connect with our industrial automation experts at FPE Automation to learn more. We’ll show you how DPMs, fixed scanning, and machine vision technologies can work together to increase high-quality production in your manufacturing plant on day one.

To get started, contact us. We’d be glad to help.

Brought to you by FPE Automation, in partnership with Zebra Technologies as part of FPE Automation's Automation Toolbox