Metrology sits at the heart of industrial quality control, yet its true cost is often poorly understood. Between complex software, hard-to-interpret reports, and a growing sprawl of measurement tools, many expenses slip under the radar of quality teams.
To dig into these issues, we spoke with Alex Clement, Territory Sales Manager at Metrologic DCS for the U.S. market, who works closely with manufacturing sites across the country to help them optimize their measurement processes.
When you calculate your cost of quality, what metrology-related costs are commonly overlooked or underestimated?
One factor I find at many facilities is increased cycle times due to difficult software or hard-to-define GD&T callouts. Another area, which is very hard to track, is the cost to interpret a report. Basic, text reports sometimes won’t show what the real meaning of the position callout is without some serious work on the programmer to express it, and high degrees of knowledge by the stakeholder.
How can unreliable measurement data create downstream costs?
Measurement is a means of how we understand elements about reality. If your measurements are unreliable, inaccurate, or not in a useful form, it can affect your understanding of the reality of your process. This leads to bad decisions exploding your scrap and rework costs.
What are the biggest inefficiencies you see in measurement workflows today?
Multi-software environments are highly inefficient, especially when they’re supplying the same manufacturing workflows. It multiplies the workload for the same part, adds to correlation issues, and creates a disunity in reporting. To phrase it: “A man with one clock knows the time, but a man with two is never quite sure.”
What kind of metrics should we look into to uncover the hidden costs in our metrology process?
Track the meetings you do around non-conformances on your CMM reports — then try to figure out roughly how long you were spending trying to translate the problem as a group. Clarity is not a luxury, it’s mandatory in saving your teams time.
This conversation highlights a reality that’s often overlooked: the real cost of quality in metrology goes far beyond equipment prices. It hides in the time lost interpreting, correlating, and explaining data — costs that are invisible, but very real.