Wieland Chase LLC: EMPB software saves up to 84% time on test drawings and PPAP test reports

Evolving their business by updating their ballooning and PPAP process

Wieland Chase LLC, with locations in Los Angeles (CA, USA) and Montpelier (VT, USA), supplies the North American market with high-quality brass rods, forgings and ingots for numerous applications, e.g. in construction, industrial machinery, as well as in transportation and electrical engineering, and generates €93 million in sales with its more than 300 employees. Wieland Chase is a member of the global Wieland Group and a leading manufacturer of brass rods in the USA, based in Montpelier, Ohio.

Challenge

When Wieland Chase decided to add forged parts to its traditional brass rod business, the company was inundated with new component drawings. Quality Engineer Tad Scranton set out to find a faster and easier way to stamp part drawings and produce inspection reports for manufacturing. She stumbled upon Tad's solution with InspectionXpert. What used to take 2 hours now only takes 20 minutes.

When Tad Scranton first joined Wieland Chase, it was exclusively a brass rod manufacturer. However, as the market shifted and competition increased, they had to diversify. They added brass forgings to their range and Wieland Chase immediately saw an increase in business. Adding fabricated pieces with dimensions required a major shift in processes throughout the company, but especially in quality. Fortunately, this was all in Tad's wheelhouse. He started his career as a machinist, so he knew how to read part drawings, machine and measure parts.

When Wieland Chase started making forgings, there was a huge influx of drawings and proposals. "The moment you thought you could keep up, you didn't," says Tad. It took Tad two hours to create a stamp drawing and the inspection sheets for his PPAP inspection reports. He used Microsoft Word to add a balloon to the part drawing and then typed the dimensions and descriptions into Excel to create his inspection reports. In the event of a revision of the part, Tad would then have to manually renumber each balloon in Word and update all his inspection reports. "I knew there had to be a better way to do this," says Tad.

How the EMPB software InspectionXpert helped

Tad was looking for a solution to speed up the stamping of drawings. He received free access to InspectionXpert and confirmed that the software would help him produce stamp drawings and inspection reports faster. He was also happy about the security of the software. "In the end, I chose InspectionXpert because of the transparency. I knew exactly what I was getting and who I was getting it from".

With InspectionXpert, Tad can balloon his part drawings and create check sheets for the floor in 20 minutes – an 84% time savings from his old manual process. Tad and his coworker Kelli Entenman are using InspectionXpert to create control plans, check sheets, and PPAP Dimensional Results Reports.