Our 3 pm QA walk turned into stand-up comedy when the gantry printed “ASAP” as the part number on the Rev C brackets and half the line thought we’d pulled the milestone forward. We re-baselined in five minutes, updated the pick list, and added “no adverbs in part names” to the quality plan. What’s your best mislabeled-part or shop-floor ‘schedule change’ that derailed a perfectly good timeline?
We had the gantry spit ‘TBD’ onto Rev B housings at 2:50 pm — — MRB quarantined everything and our 4 pm pickup slipped. Now we hard-block words like ‘ASAP’/‘TBD’ in the labeler with a regex and do a 30-second barcode scan against the pick list before the 3 pm QA walk, though it does slow the first article a tad. If you hate regex, a simple two-letter family prefix + 5 digits has kept us out of trouble.
Right after a 3 pm QA walk, our gantry etched “ASAP-Rev C” on a run because the job name leaked into the part field, . We fixed it with a regex whitelist and a small blocklist like @grace_flo69 noted, plus a five-minute “dry-run print” at changeover so the pick list gets touched before metal does. Caveat: blocklists miss creative typos, so we also require a quick barcode scan against ERP or it won’t print.
After a shift where ‘URGENT’ ended up etched as the PN, we locked the labeler behind a two-scan gate — router barcode + ERP work order must match before it will print — and it’s cut mislabels to near zero; tiny caveat: it adds about 5 seconds per lot, but worth it, @amelia6610.