Architect a solution
Background
Fabrikam, Inc. manufactures industrial metal cutting machines. The company installs and services the machines for customers.
Fabrikam has manufacturing plants in Canada, France, and China. The company also has regional service organizations that are responsible for installation and maintenance of the machines.
Current environment
Overview
Operations for the company are managed very informally. Only a small number of long-term employees are aware of all manufacturing processes. The company has been experiencing quality issues associated with its manufacturing operations and installations.
The company wants to implement a way to capture quality inspection results for each machine produced. Current inspection checklists are stored in the Files section of a Teams channel for inspectors. Inspectors commonly print the incorrect inspection checklist. The company has specific inspection stations for certain inspection steps. Each station has the gauges and equipment required for related inspection steps. There is often a backlog at specific inspection stations. This results in delays in shipping machines to customers.
Accounting system
- The current system does not handle shop floor or manufacturing planning functionality.
- Machines are assigned serial numbers and placed in stock until they are shipped to customers.
- Employee information is maintained only within the accounting system. Access to the information is strictly controlled due to privacy regulations and company policies.
Other systems
- The company has an enterprise Microsoft 365 subscription. The company uses Microsoft 365 only for sending and receiving email. The company uses photos of employees to generate employee badges. Photos are uploaded into Microsoft 365 user profiles.
- The company recently started using Dynamics 365 Field Service to manage and maintain the machines that it installs for its customers. The app has not been customized.
- The company has added roles, skills, and certification proficiencies to Dynamics 365 Field Service resources to support both customer onsite inspections and final manufacturing inspections.
Requirements
Quality inspection app
Fabrikam is evaluating Microsoft Power Platform to determine whether it can meet the company’s requirements for a manufacturing defect and quality inspection solution. Each machine produced must be subjected to a quality inspection at various points during production. Each machine must undergo a more extensive quality inspection before the machine can be shipped to the customer.
Inspection orders
Inspection orders must:
- Allow entry of quality ratings of passed or failed for each quality metric identified for the machine being rated.
- Include information about the person who performed each inspection step and any comments made by the inspector.
- Be automatically marked as failed if one inspection step rating is marked as failed.
- Be automatically marked for re-inspection should a machine fail inspection. The new inspection order must be created by using the originating inspection order as a template.
- Inspectors must fill in findings comments and upload at least one photo for any inspection step that is marked as failed.
Inspection standardization
Standardized checklists must be stored in the solution for use by inspectors. A copy must be created when a new inspection is initiated.
The solution must:
- Prevent an inspector from proceeding to the next step of the checklist until required information for a step is entered.
- Support the addition of steps to inspections to support custom features added to a machine for a customer.
- Support the direct input of measurements from testing gauges to avoid incorrect readings being entered by inspectors.
- Provide a visual representation of the testing measurement limits for each step. Include an indication of how the measured value compares to measurement limits and whether the measurement is within tolerance. Users must be able to configure the visualizations to display the minimum value and maximum value, and whether the reading is within the tolerance of a single targeted value. It must also be able to be used for maintenance inspections once the machine has been installed.
- Support the ability to store photo references within each inspection step to document defects found during inspections.
Security
- Users must be active employees of Fabrikam.
- When a user signs into the inspection solution, the solution must display a picture of the employee who has signed in.
- Supervisors must be able to modify standard checklists. Other employees must be prevented from modifying checklists.
- You must prevent users from changing inspection order data once an inspection is marked as final.
Analytics and reporting
The solution must:
- Provide metrics including existing and upcoming demand by inspection station, average time spent per user at a station, and average time a machine spends at each inspection point.
- Provide metrics per inspector including number of inspections performed by month, and number of inspections per rating type (pass, fail).
- Provide a printed quality certificate to be included with each machine.
Issues
During initial testing of the solution, testers report that they cannot see the photos taken during a previously failed inspection.