Futuramic Moves Into the Future with SA
Futuramic Tooling and Engineering Company is a high end tooling provider for the aerospace and automotive industries. They are located in Warren, Michigan and began as a tool supplier for the booming auto industry in the 1950s. They continue to have a reputation for providing exotic tooling with speed and precision. In large part, Futuramic relies heavily on their use of laser trackers and SpatialAnalyzer® (SA) to meet aggressive production demand. SA is used during the tool building process, final inspection of tooling and for advanced analysis and reporting.Futuramic Moves Into the Future with SA
Futuramic Tooling and Engineering Company is a high end tooling provider for the aerospace and automotive industries. They are located in Warren, Michigan and began as a tool supplier for the booming auto industry in the 1950s. They continue to have a reputation for providing exotic tooling with speed and precision.
Chris Guiney, the Laser Tracker Department Manager at Futuramic, explained the history of the company and how they made a transition to aerospace. “When automotive fixture manufacturing began to move out of the United States, the auto tooling industry began to back off. Naturally, due to our high level of accuracy in our fixture manufacturing, meeting the aerospace requirements was not a stretch. With over 50 years experience in manufacturing tight tolerance inspection fixtures, we’ve excelled at conforming to our customer requirements and processing them through design and build,” Guiney said.
In large part, Futuramic relies heavily on their use of laser trackers and SpatialAnalyzer® (SA) to meet aggressive production demand. SA is used during the tool building process, final inspection of tooling and for advanced analysis and reporting. With the increased need for aerospace tooling in the commercial manufacturing and defense industries, Futuramic had the need to decrease build and inspection times and generate detailed reporting. Also, since SA is already widely accepted as the standard in the aerospace measurement world, Futuramic provides final inspection reporting back to their clients in a format they are familiar with.
“SA has given us the edge in the industry to show real time and with complete clarity in reporting that high level of integrity. It was a logical choice in inspection software, one that holds the same level of professionalism as we do. This software works for both beginners and advanced inspectors. And NRK has a very knowledgeable support staff, who are willing to answer any call,” Guiney said.
SA’s advanced functionality has benefited Futuramic in several specific ways: SA can handle numerous CAD formats, which have allowed Futuramic to take advantage of nominal CAD models for building and inspection of tooling. Relationship fitting has allowed Futuramic to fit to nominal CAD precisely and quickly while maintaining engineering constraints and tolerances.
Measurement Plans (MP) have allowed Futuramic to decrease tool inspection times by automating what was historically a manual process and providing faster analysis and reporting. This functionality has led to faster tool inspections, resulting in quicker sign off on the tools. Reporting is an important part of the process, and SpatialAnalyzer’s Dynamic Reporting lets Futuramic generate reports for their internal and external customers. The ability to drag and drop items from the SA Tree makes reporting easy, and when combined with MPs, reporting can be instantaneous.
SA continues to help Futuramic grow and prepare for any measurement challenges it might encounter in the future. Guiney said that they are excited to possess software like SA that’s prepared for today’s challenges and dedicated to meeting tomorrow’s responsibilities.
“Surprisingly we are still probing the depths of abilities this software has to offer. So far it has performed impeccably each time it has been tasked. I have not found a scenario that SA cannot handle,” Guiney said. That is great news for the future of Futuramic and all other SA users.
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