Contract manufacturing
A shaft comes off the mill with a critical diameter outside print. The part gets tagged. The work order stops. The call that unsticks it needs quality, engineering and operations free at the same time.
The gap
Below the confidence threshold the shop sets, or above the part value limit the quality manager sets, the agent stops. It queues the part for the MRB rather than drafting something for a rubber stamp. What it read stays attached: the measurement, the callout, the customer clause, and the reason it would not commit. The board still meets. It starts from a written position rather than a stack of PDFs.
Where the tools stop
Intake, routing, approval signatures, a record the auditor will accept: all solved. None of it is where the part is stuck. The disposition is the piece nobody sells, because the disposition is a liability. A platform selling to every shop in the industry has no reason to own one shop's fit, form and function judgment. The documentation says so plainly. The MRB is the authority, and the software waits for its answer.
Runs the nonconformance workflow end to end: intake, routing, sign off and retention. It carries the record of the disposition, not the reasoning behind it.
Document control and quality event management built for regulated manufacturers. It enforces who has to approve a disposition and keeps the audit trail proving they did.
Ties quality records to the part, the BOM and the revision, so the NCR is attached to the right drawing version. It routes the review; the review still has to happen.
Enterprise quality and EHS workflow with strong reporting across sites. The nonconformance module tracks the queue and its aging, which is how the shop knows how long parts have been waiting.
The closest thing on the market to this call. Its AI Automations for Defect Management lets a shop configure a prompt that sorts a defect record into scrap, use as is, rework or question. By its own description the sort runs on descriptive keywords in the record, not on a comparison between the measured deviation and the governing tolerance.
Its AI layer reads across quality events for trends and probable root causes. That is a look backwards over many records, not a call on the part in the crib.
Finds patterns across nonconformances to feed CAPA work. Useful for deciding what to fix in the process, silent on whether this feature at this measurement ships.
What changes
The agent reads the open NCR and the part drawing with its GD&T callouts. It reads the customer spec or PO language that governs acceptance. It drafts one of scrap, rework, repair or use as is. It cites the callout or clause it relied on, and scores its own confidence. The quality engineer reads the draft, agrees or overrides, and signs. The agent never dispositions a part.
Drafted recommendation, awaiting signature
What the engagement needs
The NCR record, the part drawing with its GD&T callouts, and the customer spec or PO clause governing acceptance. Whatever files they live in today are the files the agent reads. No new system to populate. No data entry project first. A member of the MRB signs every recommendation. What the agent produces is a draft, not a disposition.
The whole thing
Honest limits
Two answers have to come out of a buyer conversation first. Do the drawings and callouts exist as machine readable data, or only as scanned PDFs the agent parses cold? Will the shop's auditor accept a cited, confidence scored recommendation as adequate rationale in the disposition record? Or does that auditor want a different evidentiary format? Either answer changes the build. Neither changes the premise.
This is not an empty field. Tulip already sells an AI defect classifier to exactly this buyer. Today it reads keywords in the defect record. Extend that to compare the measurement against the governing tolerance, and the room this build works in gets small fast.
The vendor descriptions here come from published documentation and product material, not from hands on trials.
More use cases
A transporter calls Wednesday to confirm a Thursday drop-off. The profile for that stream came back eleven days ago, after a lab reanalysis. It is still sitting behind four others. Approving it correctly means reading five documents at once, against a permit that lives in a different binder.
The closing count is short by a bottle's worth of hydrocodone, spread across three weeks of otherwise clean counts. Federal law gives the pharmacist-in-charge one business day from discovery to decide what that is. There is no threshold to look up.