This summer, the 10 000th GLOBAL CMM manufactured by our Qingdao factory rolled off the production line. The celebrations at the factory reflected a great feeling of pride. Since 2001, when the Qingdao factory started producing GLOBAL CMMs, the hard-working team has made breakthrough after breakthrough to continue driving production capacity and bring this ever-innovating CMM to manufacturers in the region.
The GLOBAL CMM itself has also evolved over the years to become the leading, truly international machine that it is today. Some 20 years’ ago, Hexagon acquired and brought together two of the top CMM manufacturers, Brown & Sharpe and DEA. With such trusted brands under one roof, Hexagon had a unique opportunity to unite the capabilities of the standout CMMs on the market – the DEA Mistral and Scirocco, and Brown & Sharpe’s Xcel and Micro Xcel – into a new level of CMM.
With the approach of the millennium and increasing globalization, it was clear that manufacturers needed a CMM that could not only keep pace with increasing throughput and accuracy demands but that would meet the varying requirements of customers worldwide. Hexagon’s excellent R&D and product management teams from around the world were brought together to develop a CMM that could be manufactured in multiple plants and serve our global manufacturing base with the same product characteristics, reliability, and quality worldwide.
With a global team behind it and a global market on its horizon, there was only one name for this CMM and the GLOBAL CMM went into production in factories in Qingdao, Quonset Point, Rhode Island, USA and Torino, Italy, spurring a series of technological innovations.
The GLOBAL’s patented TRICISION architecture, for example, ensures higher machine stability with its triangular beam. The GLOBAL’s throughput capabilities have been increased with enhancements to machine dynamics. And enhanced thermal compensation algorithms were implemented to maintain high accuracy even when used in environments with changing temperatures.
Our research and development teams’ commitment to keeping the GLOBAL ahead of the competition has delivered today’s GLOBAL S. The GLOBAL S is the first of our Enhanced Productivity Series (EPS). It is truly tailored to manufacturers’ productivity drivers, and in doing so expands the GLOBAL system in terms of performance, integrability, and technology compatibility, from sensors and accessories to software. With this latest generation of GLOBAL CMM, dramatic improvements have been made in scanning performance thanks to the patented Compass functionality.
At the celebrations in Qingdao, Norbert Hanke, President & CEO at Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division, signed the qualified certificate of the 10 000th GLOBAL CMM and reiterated his vision for the 100 000th GLOBAL being produced at the factory. With the Qingdao factory’s use of robot part assembly and automatic guided vehicles, it’s easy to see this vision becoming a reality. But one question remains: in what other ways will this CMM evolve and continue to transform quality capabilities around the globe?
