Quality Assurance in the Plastics Processing Industry

Different rules apply in plastics processing than in many traditional manufacturing processes. Multi-cavity molds, different part shapes within a single shot, material and color changes, as well as the effects of cooling and shrinkage, place special demands on quality assurance. At the same time, statistical process control (SPC) is often not a priority, as many quality characteristics are not subject to a continuously controllable process. What is crucial, rather, is that the right characteristics are inspected at the right time under the currently applicable production conditions. This is exactly what QUIPSY® was developed for.

QUIPSY® recognizes machines, molds, and cavities and always takes into account which nests are currently in production and ready for inspection. Using freely definable machine, mold, and material characteristics, the system automatically selects the inspection plan best suited to the specific production situation—even when molds, materials, or colors change frequently. Especially given the wide variety of variants typical in plastics manufacturing, QUIPSY® significantly reduces the workload thanks to its inspection planning tailored to entire product families, as this requires only a very small number of inspection plans across all variants—in the best-case scenario, just one per manufacturing process or product family.

With the product options “Manual Production Date,” “Multiform Hook,” and “Delayed Order Completion,” QUIPSY® specifically supports the requirements of plastics processing. This allows the system to account for defined cooling times before inspection, automatically inspect multiple part shapes within a single shot in the correct order, and correctly assign the corresponding cavities.

In conjunction with ProBDE, inspection characteristics are additionally controlled based on production status—for example, before production begins, at defined shot intervals, or upon completion of a production order. In this way, QUIPSY® realistically models the specific characteristics of plastics processing and supports reliable, reproducible, and efficient quality assurance in areas where universal CAQ systems without industry-specific functions reach their limits.