Hexagon Automates the Part Loading That Keeps CMMs Idle

Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence has launched METRICAL, an automated queuing, loading and unloading system for coordinate measuring machines. It comes in three variants — three, five or seven preparation bays — and integrates with the company's MAESTRO and GLOBAL CMMs on both new and existing installations.

The problem it addresses is a familiar one that rarely appears on a capacity plan. A CMM is a precision instrument that spends much of its life waiting for a human to put a part on it. The measuring cycle may take four minutes; the loading, fixturing and unloading around it take longer, happen only when an inspector is present, and stop entirely at the end of the shift. The machine's utilisation is set by part handling, not by measurement.

METRICAL attacks exactly that. Modular fixturing allows rapid reconfiguration between part types, operators set up tasks through a visual software interface, and dashboards report real-time production status. Hexagon positions the result as off-shift, unattended inspection with minimal human oversight, and claims increased CMM throughput and overall equipment effectiveness plus reduced dependence on skilled inspection labour. Jorg Deller, vice president for product technology hardware in Hexagon's stationary metrology division, describes it as removing the part-handling bottleneck.

This is the metrology equivalent of machine tending, and it arrives for the same reasons robotic tending arrived on machine tools: the cell is expensive, the operator is scarce, and the work in between is repetitive. The retrofit path is the commercially interesting part — an installed GLOBAL that can be given a loading system is a much easier business case than a new measuring cell.

The constraint to check before the business case closes is upstream. Unattended inspection only pays if parts arrive at the queue in a known state and the fixturing library covers the mix actually running. A quality lab that inspects fifty part numbers a week in lots of three will fill seven bays with changeover, not throughput. The sites that gain are the ones with a stable mix and a queue that already backs up overnight.