Background: Vitec Fuels New Efficiency with Freedom's ADC Solutions Business Situation Founded in 1997 and based in Detroit, Vitec LLC is a tier-one supplier of plastic fuel tanks. The up-and-coming company, which is also a tier-two supplier for Harley Davidson, manufactures 850,000 fuel tanks a year for automotive giants Daimler Chrysler and GM.

Situation:
Facing heavy production volumes, stringent inspection requirements and deadlines, always deadlines, the lasore pressing was the fact that Vitec was issued a directive by their customer to take immediate corrective actions in their inspt thing Vitec needed was a basic ADC system disguised as a workhorse error proofing system. Yet, such was the case at Vitec. Mection validation process.

Challenge:
Customers were unable to verify whether each of the fuel tanks Vitec shipped had passed inspection. No one could say for sure if a tank had skipped inspection or something else had happened instead. And with an industry standard requiring 100 percent inspection compliance, this was indeed a problem.

The cause? Limitations in Vitec’s existing process did not catch errors during inspection or prevent shipments of either un-inspected or mislabeled tanks. Furthermore, their solution lacked the capability to effectively capture and track the history of each fuel tank. Fully aware of how quickly problems like this can jeopardize hard-won client relationships, Vitec realized two things: they needed a data collection system with advanced error proofing capabilities and they needed it quick.

Solution:
Before Freedom’s error proofing solution was implemented at Vitec, their basic manufacturing process was this: