ATS endeavours to work as closely as possible with customers that have already purchased the product and used it to enhance their production methods. By doing so the product can be adapted to new styles of working while incorporating emerging technologies.
ATS Inspect is being used by global and local manufacturers including Navistar, Yamaha (watercrafts and golf carts), Toyota, Rolls-Royce (aerospace), M.A.N., Pepsi-Cola (snacks) and Wedgewood.
"We run user group sessions every month to share best practice, hear about any concerns and discuss new features and enhancements," says Mike James, Group Managing Director of ATS. "We have invested heavily in expanding the development and support team and the short term product roadmap calls for a new version every six months with interim enhancements for customer specific solutions."
All customer specific enhancements are included in the new version. In this way users are benefiting from rapid best practice sharing. Deployments are then supported by expert teams including Lean and Six Sigma specialists. Version 5.3 is particularly important to users who need variable data collection and SPC, the new form composer offers improved ergonomics," he adds.
The result is a product and a service designed to improve users quality and efficiency. The following new modules have been developed and are now available in ATS Inspect version 5.3:
• Variable Data Collect allows operators to record Critical To Quality characteristics such as lengths, diameters, temperatures, voltage or weight. Statistical process control charts are also now available for real-time data analysis. Customers asked to have all data, attribute and variable, in one portal; and this has been implemented.
• Form Composer can be used to create fully customisable layouts for the Data Collect module. An intuitive What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get designer and powerful scripting possibilities allow for customisation of data collection screens.
• This new data management tool allows the removal of historical data from the Inspect database and store it on a separate file. This will free up online resources and increase the analytical speed of production systems by reducing the amount of data in the system.
• This module allows system administrators and other IT/technical resources to configure, manage and monitor communication processes and services for external systems that send information to and from Inspect. It manages the configuration of the new .NET version of Inspect Communication Services and will eventually replace Inspect Enterprise Manager.
There have also been many major enhancements to improve existing functionality, such as:
• Acting on feedback from the shop floor, the radius at which a defect can be selected in Data Collect and Auditor can now be modified, making it easier to select.
• A question can be cloned and modified so that it appears in more than one category of the same checklist.
• A question can now be included in an entire product group as well as in individual products.
• In order to speed up the start-up process for Data Collect and Auditor, instead of loading all views when logging in, there is an option that will allow them to only be loaded when they’re required.
• In cases where the operator doesn’t require a detailed image on which to highlight faults, the size of a view can be reduced to speed up the image loading process.
• There have been several updates incorporated to make the information you need during the design phase more easily accessible where you need it most. For instance, when looking at layouts associated to stations, the screens contained in the layout are now also shown.
• There have also been improvements to the real-time updating of information on the shop floor. When an existing checklist question has been modified, or a new one has been added, it can be made instantly available on the production line at the touch of a button.