About Net-Inspect

Net-Inspect's Story

Net-Inspect was originally developed in 1999 by Mike Dunlop and his team at QPM Aerospace, an aerospace component manufacturing company. The team needed a new, responsive quality system to complement the state-of-the-art manufacturing plant they were building in Portland, Oregon. The plan involved integrating all 45 of the facility's Mori Seiki machines into a quality management system. These CNC machines acted as the basis of a planned lights-out operation that would allow QPM to globally compete with respect to cost and quality.

The QPM team reviewed the existing quality management systems available and realized that to achieve their quality and cost goals, they needed to design their own system. The team wanted a proactive system that would prevent quality issues from occurring rather than just documenting them when they occurred. The advanced process management provided by their Net-Inspect prototype, with its rigorous root cause analysis (CAPA), significantly cut scrap and rework costs and drastically reduced deviation in the machining process.

This unprecedented process predictability, coupled with lights-out manufacturing, provided a highly stable platform that served as a catalyst for the company’s growth, from $300,000 in sales to $30 million in less than ten years.