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ADDRESSABLE PROBLEM

In the manufacturing sector quality control is often performed only at the end of the main production phases. As a result, minor errors, which could have been easily rectified accumulate, and lead to an unusable end product – waste of both the material, energy and production capacity. This is a challenging situation, especially in domains with relatively low sales margin and when applied to lot size one – e.g. in custom metal fabrication. Introduction of inline quality control after each production step will allow early detection of problems and triggering either reworking the piece or rejecting it early and reusing whatever raw material is still usable. However, such an approach faces some barriers – currently the inspection steps need be set up and incorporated into the production process manually which complicates introduction of new products. Moreover, the rest of the enterprise is not ready to handle continuous quality information – once the routing is set, reworking without replanning it in near real time may lead to even bigger delays.