Do You Know What Your Inspection Team Actually Does?

What is First Article Inspection?

First Article Inspection (FAI) is a method of quality assurance used by designers to validate the accuracy of manufactured parts or products.

This may be the first item off the production line or a cross-section sample of a batch, but either way, these parts are reviewed and checked against the original drawings and tolerances by an inspection team.

Why do we need Inspection Teams?

Quality assurance teams must interpret the design, identify key dimensions, and verify accuracy, often with limited input and heavy manual effort.

Every day, SOLIDWORKS designers create innovative products and send them out for manufacture, often across different sites or even countries resulting in a lot of products needing quality checks!

So how can designers be sure that what comes back matches the design intent? Well, this is where your inspection team steps in.

Whether based in-house or on the factory floor, inspection engineers are responsible for interpreting design data and ensuring that the built product is both accurate and within tolerance.

Their role is vital but often overlooked.

Design Data: Passed Along or Passed Over?

In many businesses, the handover that an inspection team receives is informal, and may simply consist of an email with a PDF-attachment of the design data and a short note to “Just make sure it’s okay,” introducing risky ambiguity to the process.

The inspection team must then figure out the key features of the design, which dimensions are critical, and identify any flexibility in manufacturing.

They typically start by building a First Article Inspection (FAI) document. That involves identifying the most important dimensions on the drawing because, realistically, no one is going to measure all three hundred dimensions, notes, and tolerances manually. Your business simply does not have time for that!

Time-Consuming Calculations

From here, the inspector needs to calculate the acceptable upper and lower limits for each of those key dimensions.

Have you ever tried to quickly subtract 0.085 from 9.750 mm and then add 0.025 to get the max range? Well, multiply that by dozens (or hundreds) of features and you’ll see just how easy it is to become “number blind” or miss a decimal point.

Each of these values must be cross-referenced back to the original drawing using balloon annotations so the FAI report lines up with the part and can be checked quickly on arrival.

It’s laborious. It’s manual. And it’s prone to human error.

Automating First Article Inspection

Thankfully, there is a better way! SOLIDWORKS Inspection automates the entire process, easing the burden on inspection teams and reducing time spent on tedious manual processes.

Extract required data directly from your SOLIDWORKS drawings, calculate all tolerances, and even synchronise with CMM inspection equipment, removing hours of manual work and significantly reducing the risk of error.

SOLIDWORKS Inspection also integrates with SOLIDWORKS PDM to support design teams in safeguarding their CAD and FAI data while providing a complete audit trail.

Discover how SOLIDWORKS Inspection can transform your design development journey by booking a demonstration of the software.

In upcoming blogs, we’ll explore how design teams can support inspection workflows more effectively and help save even more time and further reduce costs.