Enabling Reuse of Inspection Data to Support Robust Design: A Case in the Aerospace Industry

The use and reuse of information and knowledge from manufacturing are crucial to secure the quality of the product throughout the product realization process. Robust design, variation simulation, virtual verification and root causes analysis are activities that require inspection data to ensure a robust process. In many industries, the level of inspection data reused is rather low. In this study, general barriers for reusing data concerning manufacturing processes have been identified in scientific literature and compared with specific barriers identified in a case study performed at an aerospace engine manufacturer. As an output of this comparison, barriers to the reuse of inspection data have been classified in three types: informational, technical, and organizational. In addition, the informational barriers are decomposed in four questions: Why, What, When and, How to measure. A support to answer those questions and overcome the informational barriers is proposed.