CMM inspection

I'm a Quality Engineer that does CMM programming. My company designs & manufactures medical products as well as aerospace and defense stuff... from single prototype jobs to full scale multi-million piece production orders.

As far as my responsibilities go...I am involved in the design meetings from a "quality" standpoint. I look at the prints, bubble them, identify any crazy requirements & provide risk assessment input, ensure we have the appropriate instruments to measure each and every feature, write the quality control plan for the part, then whatever is determined will be a CMM check....I write the programs offline. I then run them for the first time online once parts are made and validate the program's accuracy by verifying everything on the rock. After program validation, the routines are uploaded to a "Validated" file and then the Insp. Dept will use them once the jobs are in production. Once ALL of this is done, I work with my customer's Supplier Quality Engineers and Auditors & "sell" them on the inspection process & they give us their blessing to move forward.

Our Production Dept. works with me and gives me a copy of their tooling sheet for the job. This will tell me which boring bars generate which surfaces and etc. That stuff gets noted in the program so the insp dept can have a better understanding of whats going on & how they should approach certain things from a measurement standpoint.

As a rule of thumb, we DO NOT tell production what to do. We only tell them where they're at by showing them the data. If they challenge the results, we'll do plate layout with them & hopefully come to a common understanding that will resolve the issue.

In our company, quality is the driving force. If I tell you the part is bad, there isn't any arguments. Production works with quality not the other way around. We as Quality Engineers and Technicians have the authority to stop production if there's a problem.

In our company, quality is the driving force. If I tell you the part is bad, there isn't any arguments. Production works with quality not the other way around. We as Quality Engineers and Technicians have the authority to stop production if there's a problem.