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Mobile Applications (on Tablets) for Quality Inspections

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Quality Control TipsOver the past three years, I guess more than a dozen people have told me “tablets are a perfect fit for inspectors”. Yet I haven’t seen any company that developed a good application that works on iPad or Android, and that is suitable for quality inspections.

The truth is, it is complicated. We’ve been working for 4 months on a mobile QC app and it is only starting to work nicely. And that’s without counting all the work on the IT system to be used in the office — that was another 8 months of development…

And yet, this is way to go for all inspectors. There is nothing that is currently done on paper or on a laptop that can’t be done on a tablet. But there are LOTS of things that can be done on a tablet and that are currently impossible for most inspectors.

A good tablet application brings a lot of benefits to quality control managers:
  • Statistics about suppliers and inspectorsŠ
  • History of inspector actions with exact time, to ensure they take the time necessary to do the job and to understand what sequence they follow
  • Assurance that right files will be available
  • Real-time information for urgent orders (contingent on internet connection inside the factory)
There are also benefits for the quality department¹s admin assistant:
  • Easier management of samples, tools, etc.
  • Many semi-automated actions (confirmation emails, requests for tools, etc.)
And, last but not least, the benefits for QC inspectors are tremendous:
  • Reporting, sending photos, etc. takes much less time (it is all automated)
  • They are guided step by step in a procedure (lower risk of forgetting something)
  • Claiming expenses takes less time
  • A tablet is lighter and cheaper than a laptop

So here you go… This is the future. And maybe Google Glass will be even more convenient. I’d be curious to head from readers who have already experimented with mobile applications.

(By the way, any self-promotional comments will be erased.)

Comments

  1. Very interesting, especially when you think about the possibility of buyers to follow a QC in real time, and supplier analytics.. not to mention the time and money saved. Glass has potential, but it all depends on how well received it is by the market. If not, it will be impossible to support the necessary ecosystem of developers, not to mention future development of the OS.

  2. This is such a game-changer for the quality inspection market. This will certainly make it easier to perform a quality inspection, and this will be easier to track and analyze the findings. It’ll be interesting to see how much more this area grows and improves in the future. Thanks for sharing about this!