Across industries, quality inspection is essential. Not only does thorough review of products ensure lower rates of returns from unsatisfied customers, it promotes trustworthiness in your brand. Whether you’re a grocery store making certain that your not selling rotten or damaged fruit, a toy manufacturer inspecting the safety of the paints and components of a given item, or an automotive giant checking that your cars won’t suddenly stall out or hydroplane unexpectedly, quality assurance is vital to both attracting and retaining customers.
Of course, it’s one thing for a local fruit seller to guarantee all the apples outside his shop are looking up to expectation, and another thing for the car company churning out thousands of units a year to ensure that their vehicles don’t result in potentially catastrophic accidents. The larger your output (and the more severe the consequences of a product failing to meet standards), the higher the stakes and the easier it is for quality to waver when inspections are handled manually. In fact, even with modern Computer Vision technology, businesses of all sizes, across industries are feeling the strain of increasingly rigorous quality control. The time and the resources it takes to be thorough, compounded by the stress of failing to dot every “i” and cross every “t” can be genuinely draining.
This state of affairs has driven many organizations to seek out AI-Vision solutions to complement their existing quality assurance procedures—to great success, at that! In fact, quality inspection using AI Vision tools have revolutionized the way many organizations conceive of, structure, and carry out their protocols.
Why Quality Inspection is Crucial and How AI Vision Simplifies the Process
As any business that takes quality assurance seriously (which should be all of them!) knows, the inspection process can be incredibly time and resource intensive. Whether or not your criteria are a life and death matter, inspections must be incredibly detail-oriented—both to uphold customer expectations and to, often, satisfy regulatory requirements. When something goes awry, it can result in a damaged reputation, a fine, an injury, or worse. As such, most organizations have an extensive list of criteria and processes that go into the inspection process, the cumulative sum of which can often be difficult to keep track of and catalog efficiently.
It’s here where AI solutions are making a major impact on how enterprises are approaching their quality inspection strategies. By investing in the proper tools, making sure that inspection processes are up-to-date with the most recent and relevant requirements, and that every employee has access to the proper information is easier than ever. But this level of AI-driven automation—which may even be updated based on organization-specific data—is only the beginning.
How AI Vision in Quality Inspection Eliminates Tedium and Boosts Efficiency
While there will always be parts of the quality inspection process that—for the sake of thoroughness—require manual attention, many of the smaller parts of the process are ripe for automation. In a previous blog, we explored how Computer Vision and AI technologies were revolutionizing the way in which major agricultural businesses were monitoring crop health and yield quality. Using AI for optimization of inspection processes, these enterprises have made it easier to sort fruits and vegetables based on small nuances such as shape or color, freeing up manual resources that could be better spent elsewhere.
The potential of these technologies is not limited to agriculture, however. In the same way that a factory farm can use AI to spot and tag fruits whose appearance make them better suited for use in jams than sitting on supermarket shelves, an automobile manufacturer could use AI to quickly and uniformly spot dents in a vehicle’s body or issues with paint. This would then allow inspection professionals to devote more time to health and safety protocols as opposed to aesthetic standards.
Enhance Your Inspection Process with AI Vision for Superior Quality Control
Much of the negative discourse around AI has focused on concerns as to how it might lessen the quality of the projects in which it is used. After all, critics say, if you can just rely on these solutions to do everything for you, what’s to stop teams from getting sloppy. When it comes to quality inspection using AI Vision tools, this might seem especially worrisome—sloppiness and quality assurance are necessarily opposed.
However, in this case (as in many others), the opposite is true. AI vision, while streamlining the quality inspection process, is not designed to cut corners. In fact, it’s meant to augment the areas where manual inspection might fall short, miss details, or take up unnecessary resources. Not only that, it allows quality inspection professionals to devote their time and attention to the assurance areas where stakes are the highest.
With AI Vision, you can take your quality inspection protocols to the next level. This is not a component of your business where you want to turn down an extra set of eyes.
Optimize Your Quality Inspection Process with Akridata’s Inspection Studio!
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