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Industry case studies

Contract and Swiss shops

Example industry study

First article reports built from the drawing

A first article report starts with ballooning the drawing and listing every characteristic with its target and tolerance. On a busy drawing that takes an hour or more before a single part is measured. Generated from the drawing, the list is ready in seconds and the inspector only enters readings.

01

Situation

  • Inspectors balloon drawings and type characteristic lists by hand for every new part.
  • Reports get rejected for paperwork mistakes, not bad parts.
  • New-part launches wait on inspection paperwork.

02

Approach

  • Time the paperwork on a few recent first articles.
  • Generate the balloons and characteristic list from the drawing, in your customer's format.
  • Check readings against tolerance as they are entered, so problems show up before the report is signed.

03

What to check

  • How long does a first article take before anything is measured?
  • How often is a report sent back for a paperwork error?
  • Do your inspectors spend more time typing or measuring?

What the numbers say

Every figure says where it comes from. Vendor claims are marked as vendor claims.

~1 min

Per characteristic to balloon a drawing by hand: 30 to 40 minutes for a 30 to 40 characteristic drawing.

Vendor claimHartwell, reported by InspectionXpert

79

Characteristics our generator numbered on one sample manifold block, in under a second.

MeasuredCortana drawing bench

2.2% vs 3.3%

Scrap and rework as a share of sales at the best machine shops against the rest.

SurveyAmerican Machinist benchmark survey, 2008

$23.35/h

US median wage for inspectors and testers, before benefits.

Government dataBureau of Labor Statistics, May 2025

Try it on sample data

Balloon a drawing and build the inspection list automatically

The drawing comes ballooned, with every dimension numbered and listed. Type the readings and see what is out of tolerance.

Try the demo

Good to know

An example, not a client story.

An example built from what we see in manufacturing and from published figures. It is not a client story.

How we would do it

The steps behind this work.

Every study follows the same steps: find the bottleneck, redesign the work, test the fix, and keep the math where you can check it.