I’m looking for some feedback on how others are handling the creation of AS9102 compliant First Article Inspection Report forms. A couple of years ago we migrated from manually ballooning drawings and creating the FAIR forms in Excel to using Discus software. The Discus application imports a pdf file of the drawing (automatically generated as part of our drawing release procedure) and through user interaction, balloons the drawing and uses OCR to create a AS9102 based inspection sheet in Excel. In our use case this form and the ballooned drawing are printed, travel together and data is entered manually. This has yielded improvements in both creation time and accuracy of the forms. Currently the work is done by quality department personnel.
Our quality department is looking to improve this process further. We originally looked at Discus and InspectionXpert, but found the pdf OCR & balloon method easier to use and slightly more reliable in Discus. Unlike Discus, InspectionXpert does offer a direct integration within Pro/E’s drawing module, which at the surface would seem to be even more efficient. Being integrated it truly recognizes the dimensions as dimensions, GD&T as GD&T etc. However, that would mean the person generating the FAIR forms would be using a seat of Pro/E and the PLM tool and have at least a basic proficiency in both. This potentially pushes the responsibility for creating the FAIR form from quality to the CAD operators in engineering. As they are typically very busy already, I’m not sure how well this would work (might take less time, but more time to get to it…so no real improvement)….which is the other reason we went with Discus – no CAD tool integration or license required, still drawing based etc,. I don’t see us going the way of annotated 3D models (“drawingless”) for quite some time yet.
How are you doing this? Who in your company is responsible for creating FAIR forms? Are you using an automated or semi-automated process? Is it done with a separate tool or something that integrates with Pro/E / Creo? If you had it to do over again, would you do it the same way? What other thoughts or recommendations do you have? Thanks!
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