Inspection Software to Balloon Drawings and Create First Article Reports

[JD84219]

This question has been asked various times but not in the last couple of years.
We are investigating the purchase of inspection software to balloon drawings and create first article reports in various formats (AS9102, PPAP, customer specific forms, etc.)

- Are you using software that performs this function?
- Which software?
- What are its pros and cons?
- Do you recommend it?
- Have you compared other software packages recently (last 12 months)?

Previous threads (2011) mentioned: Inspection Xpert, VisualFair, DISCUS and NETinspect.

Are there others I should consider in 2014?

 

[adamsjm]

I will be interested in following this thread. The software should also support exporting the requirement data and "balloon" numbers to your PFMEA software as the requirements listing is the starting point for the PFMEA's Characteristic Matrix.

 

[Chrisx]

We currently use InspectionXpert for SolidWorks. I see no reason why it could not export these items to a PFMEA. It can export to any excel template once the template is configured. It comes with a tool to configure the template, which I found easy to use.

I'm not sure how it compares to other software out there. It does have some idiosyncracies. The bubbles sometime seem to be in an odd order. There is no way to change the order of bubbles. Sometimes it will miss a dimension or note and there is no way to manually add additional bubbles. Still it is much faster and less error prone than manually creating these documents.