Cosmetic Inspection System

The Problem

GCM was carrying a $2M financial burden tied to manual cosmetic and hardware inspection — operators eyeballing parts for scratches, fingerprints, helicoils, serial numbers, and hole dimensions. Sixteen hours per day were being burned on inspection labor while throughput stayed bottlenecked at the QC bench.

The Approach

Designed and built an automated cosmetic inspection system from the ground up. A steel tube frame anchors a robotic arm and camera over the part under a safety-locked enclosure, driven by a custom user interface that orchestrates imaging routines and emits PDF inspection reports per unit. Vision pipelines were tuned to detect scratching down to 20 microns, fingerprints, helicoils, serial numbers and barcodes, and hole dimensions in one pass.

The Outcome

The system lifted the $2M financial burden, eliminated 16 hours per day of manual inspection labor, and lifted manufacturing throughput by 300% across the factory floor. Inspection became a deterministic, machine-driven step that scales with production instead of fighting it.