Witness Inspection company gets it right
the first time

Web posted Sunday, July 22, 2001
By MIRANDA K. ANDERSON
Staff writer

PART: Mary Hamm holds a Nylon Craft part pointing out the detail that is inspected by the laser and camera at right. Sentinel/Brian Forde

The owners of Witness Inspection expect nothing less than perfection.

When parts roll off of the sorting lines and into shipping crates at the Holland-based company, partners Russ Richardson, Dave Muyskens and Kurt Haveman know there will not be a single defect in the bunch. That's thanks to their camera-based sorting equipment which "looks" at each part and checks it against pre-programmed specifications to ensure absolute quality.

Their machine vision technology, called ZPPM, can see the tiniest flaw and can measure items to five one-thousandths of an inch.

"The human accuracy rate is about 85 percent, at best," said Richardson. "Other camera sorting systems guarantee an error rate of 25 parts per million. We guarantee an error rate of zero."

The owners of Witness got their idea while working together for a local automotive supplier. The company's sorting process, using humans, was letting too many errors through. Richardson said that isn't the way to do business in the auto industry.

"The automotive industry, with the way it is going, it has to be zero parts per million errors. Automotive is going to full automation, and they can't have a bad nut shutting down the line," he said. "They're getting really serious about this stuff."

The machines use revolving turntables to funnel various parts past cameras placed to check each part from different angles for preprogrammed specifications. If a part meets the specifications, a blast of compressed air sends the part to the waiting shipping carton.

ZPPM sorting technology is flexible enough to allow for a dedicated set-up or a more versatile application, where a wide variety of parts can be run in shifts on the same machine. It takes just a few minutes to do change-outs to begin sorting a new part once the matching application is written.

WITNESS: (L-R) Bethany LaDuke and Miranda Brower sort through " Grommet's " at Witness Inspection, readying them to go through the camera inspection process. Sentinel/Brian Forde

The company's machines can inspect up to 20,000 pieces per hour on parts such as springs, injection-molded plastics, cold-headed, stamped or deep-drawn metals.

Orders are up slightly over last year at Witness, at a time when both the automotive and furniture industries have slowed production.

Marc Brown, chairman and CEO of Holland-based Metal Flow Corp., a high-volume manufacturer of close-tolerance metal components for automotive and furniture manufacturers, has used Witness for nearly three years.

After nearly 40 million pieces being sorted at Witness, Brown is a satisfied customer. Witness now handles roughly 60 percent of Metalflow's sorting needs.

"It's faster, it's more efficient, and it is less expensive. It is much more accurate, too," Brown said. "We've cut our labor costs by 80 percent and we have not received a return or complaint on anything that they have done for us."

Mark Drooger, vice president of Precision Metal Products in Holland, has used Witness for sorting for just over a year and is also pleased with the results. He said the company's equipment not only does a better job than the human eye, but it is better than similar sorting technologies he has seen, as well.

"They can do a more intricate sorting with their technology. We haven't had any complaints from customers since we started taking our stuff to them," he said.

While most clients bring their parts to Witness to be sorted, the company hopes to have more clients purchase the sorting machines to have on-site. They're also working on a program to allow the cameras to match the label on the box to the part that is inside.

Mislabeling was such a big problem at one company, Richardson said, that the customer required five signatures on a box to ensure the label matched the contents. Even that wasn't enough.

"I went over to look and the first box was wrong -- the first one," he said.

Richardson said that errors are completely avoidable if companies use the technology available to them. He thinks those who are slow to adopt the technology won't be around long.

"If anybody is continuing to hand-sort, they are going to be pushed out of the marketplace. There is no excuse for not having zero parts per million (errors)," Richardson said.