Background / History

It is now 41 years since Ernest Dawes established Scientific Glass Engineering in a tiny garage at the backyard of a house in Melbourne, Australia. Today, SGE has two modern facilities engaged in developing and manufacturing Chromatography and Analytical Products. SGE has grown substantially with 370 employees and a distribution and support network in nine countries, including worldwide distribution partners. The SGE team is continually developing innovative ideas for products and technologies that make a difference to their customers.

SGE, now an ISO accredited company, started solely as a syringe manufacturer but now manufactures a vast array of products for chromatography and mass spectroscopy. They are proud of the fact that all major instrument manufacturers in their field rely on and incorporate SGE manufactured components in their systems. For the future SGE are heavily committed to research and development to allow them to continue to bring innovative technologies and solutions to their valued partners in analytical science in all corners of the world.

The Challenge

SGE has a range of glass products that it manufactures that proved difficult and extremely time consuming to measure. It is critical to SGE's clients that there is a completely traceable and repeatable quality process in-place that assures the quality and dimensional accuracy of all components and systems supplied to the market. Without an improvement in quality systems and the use of the latest measurement technology this would be difficult to achieve and could ultimately lead to deterioration in customer satisfaction and service.

The Solution

SGE approached Hi-Tech Metrology for a solution that would enable the accurate and efficient measurement of a number of high precision glass components used in their innovative mass spectrometer product line and after a number of trials the Micro-Vu Vertex 330 automatic vision-based measuring system was selected and installed.

After operating the new Vertex measuring machine successfully for a number of weeks at their Ringwood plant, SGE soon discovered another very innovative use for the technology - the measurement of fine stainless steel wires on grid frames used in special mass spectrometer equipment for key overseas clients in the UK. SGE has found from first hand experience that the Micro-Vu system measure these types of components with a very high degree of precision and accuracy and, with the automatic routine developed by Hi-Tech Metrology, extremely efficiently. According to Quality Assurance Manager - Peter Johnston... "The new use for the Micro-Vu Vertex has been so successful that the machine is now fully committed to measuring the grids at a number of stages during the manufacturing process such that now there is no surplus capacity available for measuring other parts - including the components that the machine was originally justified on. The acquisition of the Micro-Vu Vertex has been of enormous benefit to SGE helping us further improve our quality and productivity of our core technology products."

With the extremely high utilization of the Micro-Vu equipment at SGE, the use of vision-based video measuring systems that are the basis of Micro-Vu's technology has now become a critical part of manufacturing process and the quality assurance systems employed by SGE to meet the high expectations of their growing export business.

ROI

SGE has seen a significant return on investment with the latest Micro-Vu system from Hi-Tech Metrology, the equipment has become critical and a vital part of its manufacturing processes and quality assurance program. Customers are now even more assured than ever in the commitment to quality that SGE has made with this investment and other enabling measurement technologies.

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