Autrans Corporation 
Ingersoll, Ontario

Industry: Automotive

Website: Autrans Corporation

Autrans takes just-in-time delivery to another level at its Ingersoll, Ontario, plant. Autrans manufactures engine powertrain assemblies for CAMI Automotive (a joint venture between General Motors and Suzuki), which produces a new engine in the time it takes to prepare the vehicle for engine installation on the assembly line — approximately two-and-half hours.

With 16 different combinations, each with 80 variations, across three models, error proofing and detection is a top priority for Autrans, which opened its 6500 m2 (70 000 square foot) Canadian facility in 1989. When there is a model year change, the company employs a methodology to develop the process and analyze it for potential quality issues and then looks at ways it can put countermeasures in place to detect or prevent errors.

Previously, Autrans relied on a final visual inspection, which even at its best was not 100 percent effective. The company concluded that standard sensing devices wouldn't do the trick, so Autrans began the search for a vision system with a degree of intelligence that could be programmed to look at the type of variations in the engines. After some trial and error, Autrans settled on Canavision, a multi-camera vision and assembly validation system from Markham, Ontario-based Global Controls. The Canavision system offered the capabilities the company wanted including archiving all the vision data against a reference number that matched the vehicle. This gave them traceability and history to go back and look at things as well as a high comfort level for the maintenance and engineering departments to be able to go in and reprogram or modify the system.

The system is an intelligent vision system that delivers with an array of multiple cameras — 32 in the case of Autrans — more than 60 points of inspection that cover 20 optional pieces of hardware on the engines, such a block heater, if the vehicle it is destined for was ordered with one. An important feature of this system is the ability to create and define multiple "region of interest" (ROI) windows easily through a user-friendly graphical user interface, with the assistance of a drag and drop mouse. Within minutes, all of the required features are immediately captured and entered into the system, and ready to run for production. It doesn't require users to have programming skills or knowledge on image processing to configure the system. Without stopping production, ROIs can be added, moved and adjusted on a retrain page.

Quality certification at Autrans is now objective. It also has a feature that allows supplier parts to be checked. Part proliferation also gained some attention. In some instances there are four different variations of one part and every one is interchangeable. The system allows Autrans to put into place error proofing to prevent the wrong part from being installed. For Autrans, it's all about defining the cost of quality.