If you're assessing a new machine vision project and you want to get it right, there’s only one thing you must do: Ask the right questions.
It’s that simple.
The likelihood of nailing the perfect solution without completing a thorough assessment is low, and the likelihood of completing a thorough assessment is low if you don’t ask the right questions of every consultant, technology provider, and integrator every time. Similarly, if the person (or team) you’ve chosen to build your system doesn’t ask the right questions of you, it’s going to be hard to know what you need your system to do and how to build it.
What are the right questions?
Glad you asked.
I pulled together a list based on my own experience originally and shared on my LinkedIn. Then others who have been designing, building, implementing, using, and managing vision systems for an exceptionally long time came back with their suggestions. So, I have compiled our collective thoughts below. Consider these conversation starters, as several more questions will arise as you start getting answers to these.
Why?
First up:
Why are you even considering machine vision? Is the process manual today? Or do you just want to automate the process in a different way?
Technically, these are questions that a consultant or solution engineer will likely ask you. However, it’s important to ask yourself why you picked up the phone to have this conversation with them. What’s not working as well as you feel it could be within your operation? What problems are you running into?
Once everyone understands the big picture objective, then you need to ask (or answer) these questions:
What’s the scale of your production or distribution environment? Are we talking a huge factory or one part of a production environment? Understanding production volume, speed, and the complexity of the task will help determine whether a simple or advanced machine vision solution is needed.
What?
How?
Who?
When?