Productive Metrology - Adding Value to Manufacture

Metrology has a stigma of being non-productive and in many cases the aim of production engineers is to reduce metrology costs to an absolute minimum. This paper analyzes the role of metrology in production and demonstrates, how metrology can generate value. It illustrates different ways to evaluate the benefit of metrology and gives metrologists guidance to sell metrology with economic arguments. The term productive metrology is introduced to emphasis the common interest of both production engineers and industrial metrologists to employ metrology to the best benefit of the product. Starting from information theory, the paper describes the role of metrology in production and gives basic recipes to evaluate and maximize the benefit of metrology investment. Examples from different fields of engineering illustrate productive roles of metrology.