As a small group leader in a large company that has many moving parts, with many facilities we have many different coordinate metrology systems. Many of these systems are not DMIS compliant. If one of those non-DMIS providers were to be assumed by another company and progression of that software development stalls or become crippled then we have put ourselves in a situation that may become very expensive to change. Also if we and all of our supply chain were to have DMIS compliant systems, we would be able to use the same measurement plans that were developed internally at our suppliers and vice-versa. This would save thousands of dollars on every project that our companies work on.
I have been asked by many, if everyone were to comply with the DMIS standard then your capabilities are limited. I disagree with that statement. The DMIS standard allows metrology systems to measure virtually every type of feature to every type of tolerance governed by geometric dimensioning and tolerancing and with almost every type of measurement device. If every application on the market were to meet the DMIS standard, then companies could concentrate on developing easier to use software that writes measurement plans quicker and more efficiently. I have been involved on the DMIS standards committee for almost ten years and throughout that time period I have requested several implementations to develop measurement capabilities that we needed. Since those changes were adopted in the DMIS standard, many metrology vendors have implemented them and those measurement needs can be met by more than one or two software providers. This provides my company more options for our existing measurement plans.
As a matter of fact, our CMM Collaboration Team of five separate sites has recently agreed to send to all of our metrology providers a letter encouraging them to become certified to the NIST DMIS Conformance Suite. If each of them were to prove that they can read in and read out/post out a fully conformed DMIS measurement plan, then we would not put any of our systems at risk if our existing software providers were acquired by another company.
I have talked with many of our metrology providers about DMIS Conformance testing and the ones that are not DMIS by nature have told me that their customers are simply not asking for it. “If the customer’s aren’t asking for it then we will not develop interoperability to DMIS”. I encourage all users and providers alike, regardless of being a large company or rather you are a small supplier, demand conformance. If you don’t, you have put your systems at risk and locked yourself to a single software provider for the duration.
Ray Admire is a staff level quality engineer at Lockheed Martin’s Missiles and Fire Control in Dallas, Texas. He is the group leader of the CMM Collaboration effort for MFC. Ray also serves as Treasurer for the Dimensional Metrology Standards Consortium, involved with I++, 3-D Modeling and several other technology efforts.
