Does your quality department manually balloon CAD drawings and enter data into spreadsheets to prepare your First-Article, in-process or final inspection packages? Many manufacturers spend hours ballooning CAD drawings (Figure 1) and entering data into report forms so they can prepare to inspect the products the y manufacture—a time consuming and error-prone endeavor. Aerospace, oil and gas, automotive, and medical device companies have even more requirements and specific reports that must be completed such as the AS9102 forms for aerospace or PPAP forms for the automotive industry.

InspectionXpert automates this manual process for increased accuracy and a time savings of up to 95%. InspectionXpert pulls inspection data directly from your CAD drawings to automate the creation of the ballooned drawing and populate inspection report forms from standard templates, such as AS9102 or PPAP (Figure 2), or custom templates you and easily create using the InspectionXpert Template Editor.   InspectionXpert is offered in CAD-integrated versions that work directly inside popular programs to balloon 2D drawing files (figure 3) including AutoCAD, SolidWorks, Solid Edge, Pro/ENGINEER, and CATIA or to balloon 3D models (see Figure 4)  which is currently only available with InspectionXpert for CATIA.  InspectionXpert First-Article (Figure 5) is a CAD-neutral version that works with PDF and TIFF drawing formats.

Real Results
MIC Group
MIC Group chose InspectionXpert to help them improve accuracy and speed up their processes. As a contract manufacturer, MIC Group must provide inspection data sheets with true, measured dimensions for every part they ship. On average, their parts have 300 dimensions to verify, and they often have as many as 1,800 elements. Dimensioned drawings come to MIC Group in PDF and TIFF formats from a variety of customers, and with continually changing revisions.

InspectionXpert First-Article enabled MIC Group to reduce this verification task from a five-person job to a one-person job, all while reducing job lead times and improving the accuracy of reported data. “When you look at collapsing these functions, you aren’t just looking at an improvement in one area — you are looking at a total process that, in our experience, is five times faster”, explains Nathan Bynum, General Manager

The table “Time Savings Using InspectionXpert” (figure 6) details a real-world example of their time savings. Assuming two revision cycles per part life that require two drawing comparisons or re-ballooning, using InspectionXpert reduced their time required by more than 80%. MIC Group is doing in 2 days what would have taken 11 before. The company currently has one person working full-time performing this job function. Without InspectionXpert, they calculate they would need at least four more employees to keep up with the current workload. The difference amounts to an annual savings of $120,000 per year based on a $30,000 employee salary.

Real Life Savings
One of the users of InspectionXpert First Article noted “Our average drawing has over 400 dimensions and this whole process would take us about eight hours. With the economy down we were looking for additional ways to save money on first-article inspections. This additional workload pushed us to the breaking point until we decided to find a way to automate the ballooning and FAIR creation process.

They chose InspectionXpert First- Article because its uncomplicated user interface is easy to use. When their customers revise a drawing, it is a fairly simple matter to update our inspection package to point to the new drawing. We no longer start over from scratch. When we are finished ballooning our drawing, we press a single button and the first-article inspection report form is generated automatically in the format we choose.

An extremely useful feature of InspectionXpert First-Article is the grid feature (figure 7) that enables the user to superimpose a co-ordinate grid on all pages of the inspection drawing. When the user enables the grid feature, the inspection characteristic table is updated to show the locations of all inspection characteristics relative to the grid (e.g. B.3, A.4, etc…) and this information may also be exported to Excel. The grid along with all inspection balloons and notes are exported to an inspection drawing in the form of a PDF file that anyone can open with a free PDF reader. For our larger drawings, this feature makes it easy to locate inspection characteristics during inspection. It is hard to quantify the time savings provided by this feature alone but I suspect it is significant.

“It is estimated that this tool will save at least four (4) hours per first-article inspection since we began using InspectionXpert First-Article a few months ago,” the user explained.  “That is a 50% reduction in our first-article inspection report documentation process and the output is electronic and looks much better than what we had before.”

Thomas Instrument
Thomas Instrument is an award-winning provider of engineering, manufacturing, and repair/overhaul services to the United States Department of Defense. Thomas Instrument has maintained and repaired thousands of Flight and Safety Critical Components currently in use on military aircraft. Their processes require First Article Inspection and include a zero defect quality sampling plan.  Because their success is dependent on their quality and on time delivery, they are committed to finding ways to streamline and error-proof their processes.

Thomas Instrument had been struggling with trying to streamline the creation of their First Article Inspection packages.  Dwayne Anders, Quality Engineer at Thomas Instrument, explains, “To prepare for our First Article Inspections in the past, we hand-bubbled our CAD drawings and created spreadsheets in Excel to generate our check sheets for inspection.  We typically need to inspect about 60 - 100 dimensions per drawing.  Creating the bubbled print and the check sheet, took us about four hours each on average. For an entire First-Article Inspection package for new parts or assemblies, the process could sometimes take a whole week.”

 “We saw InspectionXpert as the most efficient and accurate way to automate and error-proof the process of bubbling our CAD drawings and automatically generating our check sheets,” says Dwayne. “We decided to purchase InspectionXpert for AutoCAD and InspectionXpert for Solid Edge for use in two of our locations.  For a third location we chose InspectionXpert First-Article. We’ve trained a lot of our people to use InspectionXpert because when we do have a large set of work orders we can have people using both our network and standalone licenses to quickly generate the bubbled drawings and check sheets.  We also used the InspectionXpert Template Editor to create our own custom template that we have standardized across the company.”

“We use InspectionXpert First Article and InspectionXpert for AutoCAD more than InspectionXpert for Solid Edge, primarily because our drafters are busy with design and document modifications,” states Dwayne Anders. “With InspectionXpert First Article, we can easily create five 5 inspection packages per day on average, sometimes as many as ten packages. It takes five to thirty minutes to generate the documents whereas before InspectionXpert this process could take up to 4 hours each.  Entire First-Article packages that would easily take a week to create in the past, now only take a day.   We’ve seen a time savings of almost 90%.”

Since InspectionXpert First-Article does not require a license of CAD to function, the company was able to train one of their administrative staff to use the program to create bubbled drawings and check sheets for one of their locations.  “Because the program is so easy to use, we trained a manufacturing clerk to create these documents for us.  Even with no engineering or manufacturing experience she has been able to pick this up quickly,” explains Dwayne.  “And it’s more cost-efficient than using an engineer or drafter to create these documents, since we just need someone who can use Adobe Acrobat and Excel.” 

Another area where Thomas Instrument benefitted from InspectionXpert was AS9100 qualification.  The company had created a plan that required all manufactured parts to have a bubble print and check sheet.  Although this was a longtime goal of theirs, before InspectionXpert it was unfeasible because it was too time consuming to implement for every part.  Dwayne Anders explains, “With InspectionXpert we were able to implement that goal and now all job packets leave Configuration Management with a bubble print and check sheet. We even use InspectionXpert to create in-process check sheet documents.”

Go to www.measurementsupply.com to view one of the five-minute videos of InspectionXpert.  Or contact Measurement Supply via email at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or by calling 888.502.0220.