Quality is perhaps one of the top tenants for many manufacturing companies. Now, new technologies are enabling manufacturers to deliver higher quality products to their customers.
As one example, FineLine Technologies announced it has been granted a new patent by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. U.S. Patent No. 11,453,186 focuses on mold management, a critical process for the tire and rubber manufacturing industry.
The solution uses embedded RFID (radio frequency identification) tags of critical mold components for automatic checks of the container, segments, and sidewall plates assigned hierarchal relations, checking the sequence of segments within the container, and providing a searchable, identifiable, and status-assigned mold register that automatically stores mold location, production status, and maintenance records.
Here is how this can help in manufacturing:
- Proper mold management is key to quality of tire, accounting for roughly 35% of the tire’s quality.
- RFID enables automatic association between mold, bladder, press machine, and an individual tire.
- The solution generates a large amount of data for tire manufacturers to accurately trace the relationship of critical production components.
Looking to the future, we are going to see the rise of new technologies to improve quality. The end result will be manufacturers upgrading legacy manual processes with digital traceable processes. When will your company make the move?