Finished business

Ensuring that the products coming off an assembly line precisely match their design brief can save companies thousands of pounds in waste every year.

But this verification process can itself account for up to 20 per cent of a product’s overall cost, so streamlining procedures to ensure problems are spotted as early  as possible can have a significant impact on a company’s bottom line, as well as the  quality of its finished products.

To this end, the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), based in Teddington, has created the Product Verification Programme, which is intended to help manufacturing companies to improve their productivity and reduce waste through better measurement technologies and processes.

Philip Cooper, Product Verification Programme, NPL

This is becoming increasingly important as customers expect components to conform to ever more stringent specifications, said Philip Cooper, leader of the Product Verification Programme at NPL. “An aircraft engine manufacturer, for example, may potentially have thousands of components supplied to them from all over the world, which all need to be brought together to be assembled into  a single product,” he explained. “So whether the parts are manufactured to the specified dimensions is absolutely critical, and we are talking about tolerances right down  to a few microns.”