INDUSTRIAL & MANUFACTURING LASER SCANNING SOLUTIONS

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Industrial and manufacturing facilities are very dynamic spaces and so their laser scanning solutions must be dynamic as well.

In industrial and manufacturing facilities, materials and products need to flow through factories with great efficiency to keep costs down and productivity up. That’s one of reasons factory owners are forever re-optimizing their floor layouts—moving things around, removing old equipment, adding new equipment, etc. For example, automotive plants change things around every year to meet the manufacturing requirements of new car models. Over time, all these changes can lead to a poor understanding of what is actually on the factory floor, where these assets are located, and how much space they consume in three dimensions.

When PrecisionPoint (PPI) is called in to a manufacturing facility, our job is to use our laser scanning solutions to create a 3D reality capture of the facility and its contents. Once the point cloud model is turned over to our client, they can bring it into a solution like the Autodesk Factory Design Suite and use it as a backdrop to help place equipment and create new, more highly efficient product flows.

In some cases, PPI is called in for a more specific task, like scanning the intended path of incoming equipment to its final position. By creating a reality capture, we can help our clients accurately calculate 3D space constraints and clearances. PrecisionPoint can then model the extents of the new equipment and virtually move it through the path in the point cloud model to find clashes and interferences, minimizing costs and greatly reducing downtime on the line.

Client: Global Food/Snack Manufacturing Company

Project: Expansion to create additional food manufacturing capacity to an existing facility.

Problem: The manufacturer needed to document existing conditions to support new process engineering. They knew 3D laser scanning would be the most efficient approach, but the shiny, stainless steel surfaces common in food (and pharma) manufacturing plants can be challenging for any laser scanner.

Solution: This is where PrecisionPoint’s experience could really shine. It takes a very skilled team to not only accommodate data collection in these environments, but also to clean up noise and extra points in post processing. PPI has the best laser scanning solutions technologies and has developed the proper workflows—both in the field and in the office—to create good, clean point cloud models without all kinds of erroneous points.

For this project, the final deliverables were both the point cloud model as well as interactive SCENE Webshare imagery. PPI’s FARO SCENE Webshare Cloud is a secure, cloud-based solution for storing and sharing 3D laser scanning data in various forms. Using Webshare, our clients are able to visit their projects virtually from their desktops. It allows authorized stakeholders to view and take measurements from the project without having to revisit the site over and over again—essential to saving time, reducing costs, and improving communications.