West Bromwich-based spring manufacturer Adwin (Spring Co) Ltd (www.adwin.co.uk) has uncoiled its productivity potential by investing in a ‘state of the art’ metrology solution.

The company produces prototypes in both wire and flat materials, and caters for a wide client base — including some of the world’s largest companies — with both short-batch and large-volume production.

When it found that traditional part-measurement methods were no longer meeting the speed or accuracy needs of its growing customer base, it turned to Derbyshire-based OGP UK (www.ogpuk.com) for assistance.

OGP’s range of optical and multi-sensor SmartScope systems can gauge the characteristics of even the most complex parts quickly and without human error, leading to better quality, reduced scrap and increased throughput.

Will Hayes, Adwin quality manager, said: “We were using vernier calipers, micrometers and shadowgraphs, but different people can get different readings.

"We looked into options such as laser scanning and other non-contact systems, but we found that OGP offered the best product for us.”

Backed by intuitive and simple-to-operate software, the OGP CNC 300 machine purchased by Adwin uses a high-quality auto-calibrating camera and supports a combination of touch probes, micro probes and laser scanners.

Designed for use on the shopfloor, it collects detailed data quickly, precisely, reliably and automatically.

“We started to see the benefits within the first month. A lot of our parts, as we’re doing process inspection, were programmed up very quickly, and then the machine runs the programme in 30sec, rather than the 5min it took checking things on a shadowgraph.”