How TBI Manufacturing Used 3D Scanning to Cut Inspection Reporting Time by Up to 10×

Why a UK tube-fabrication specialist moved from per-part measuring-arm reports to whole-part scanning with the SCANOLOGY NimbleTrack-E Gen2 and PolyWorks—and what changed when it did.

In brief

Who: TBI Manufacturing, a UK tube-fabrication subcontractor making welded assemblies for off-highway vehicles.
Problem: Every sample needed its own measuring-arm setup and its own report. Development feedback was slow.
Solution: SCANOLOGY NimbleTrack-E Gen2 wireless 3D scanner with DefinSight, reporting in PolyWorks.
Result: Reporting time cut by up to 10×. Weld distortion visible across the whole part. Reports prepared from CAD before the first part is made.
For you if: You develop tooling and first-off samples for welded or bent-tube assemblies, and reporting cannot keep up.

How many inspection reports does it take to validate ten first-off samples? At TBI Manufacturing, the answer used to be ten—one setup and one report for every part on a measuring arm—while a growing queue of new projects waited for the result. The company was doubling in size, and the development stage had become the bottleneck.

When proving the part takes longer than making it

At TBI Manufacturing the question was not how to make parts faster. It was how to prove, faster, that each new tooling set and first-off sample was right.

Based in Mildenhall, Suffolk, TBI Manufacturing began as a subcontract tube-manipulation business more than 30 years ago. Today its capabilities span tube bending and forming, laser cutting, machining, welding and fabrication, powder coating and assembly. The work includes chassis, canopies, pannier and battery boxes, handrails and automotive components, with off-highway manufacturing its largest market.

As turnover grew from approximately £7–8 million two or three years ago to a forecast £14 million this year, the number of new projects grew with it. Every new fabricated assembly can require tube bends to be refined, tooling and welding fixtures to be developed, and successive samples to be checked after each change.

TBI's existing measuring arm handled this work, and it remains useful for positioning elements inside jigs and fixtures. But for validating complete parts it had three limits:

• One part, one setup, one report. Inspecting ten samples meant building ten separate reports.
• No report without a physical part. Reporting work could not start until the sample reached inspection.
• Points, not surfaces. Probed points showed where a feature sat, but not how welding distortion had moved the whole assembly.

"With the old measuring arm, every part meant its own setup and its own report—inspecting ten parts meant creating ten separate reports."
— Koushik Sujatha, New Product Introduction Engineer, TBI Manufacturing

What TBI needed Is Not A Faster Arm

The requirement was not "a faster arm." It was a different kind of evidence: a view of the whole part against the customer's CAD model that engineers, the shop floor and the customer could all read.

After comparing several measurement systems—including investing in another conventional measuring arm—TBI chose a scanning-led workflow, supplied and supported through our UK partner T3DMC. The investment formed part of a Made Smarter Adoption East of England project, supported by Suffolk County Council, delivered in partnership with Norfolk County Council and part-funded by the UK government; the program helped TBI confirm where the development bottleneck actually lay.

Why SCANOLOGY? What we bring to the shop floor

A measuring arm answers the question you asked: is this hole where the drawing says? A full surface scan answers the question you did not think to ask: what did welding do to the rest of the part?

On a tubular welded assembly, heat input pulls the structure in ways that are hard to predict and easy to miss when probing a handful of features. A color deviation map over the complete geometry shows the pattern of distortion, not just the pass/fail status of individual points. That is what lets an engineer decide between adjusting a bend, modifying a fixture or releasing the part.

Two properties of the SCANOLOGY NimbleTrack-E Gen2 make this practical on a busy shop floor. Optical tracking of the handheld scanner means the part itself needs no targets for routine scanning, so each sample iteration starts immediately. And because scanner and tracker are both wireless, the system goes to the part—a large fabrication does not have to be moved to the measurement equipment.

At TBI, the workflow connects a shop-floor scan to a desktop inspection project in three steps.

1. Prepare the inspection project before the part exists.
   The NPI team builds the PolyWorks inspection project from the customer's drawing and CAD model—alignment, dimensions, GD&T controls and report layout—while the first sample is still being made.
2. Capture the part wherever it is.
   An operator takes the NimbleTrack-E Gen2, an inspection laptop and DefinSight to the part, whether a bent tube on a bench or a complete welded assembly on the shop floor. The i-Tracker optically tracks the i-Scanner, so routine scanning needs no reference markers or magnetic targets on the part. Where a reference hole or hidden point is easier to touch than to scan, the i-Probe is tracked by the same i-Tracker.

3. Populate the report and decide.
   Scan data moves through TBI's server into PolyWorks, where it is compared with CAD. The color map shows where the complete geometry matches nominal and where deviation or weld distortion remains, alongside the defined dimensions and GD&T characteristics. Multiple samples can be brought into the same project, so ten parts produce one comparative report rather than ten.

"What really stood out about the solution from T3DMC was how easy the technology is to work with. The NimbleTrack is far more straightforward to use, and the portability means we can set it up anywhere on the shop floor, even for our larger fabrications."
— Mark Tanner, Commercial Director, TBI Manufacturing

Two members of the NPI team, including Koushik Sujatha, completed PolyWorks training. Koushik has since trained shop-floor colleagues to operate the scanner and collect data, so scan capture is spread across the team while programming and analysis stay with NPI.

A tenth of the reporting time, and closer collaboration

An early project put the workflow to work on four variants of a tubular light-arm assembly for two divisions of a major off-highway customer.

It started with the first tube bend. The tube-bending team produced a sample, inspection scanned it and fed the result back; further tubes were adjusted and re-checked until the geometry was ready to move on. TBI then built and scanned a bend-checking jig before progressing to fabrication.

In the welding stage the two instruments split the work. The measuring arm positioned elements within the welding fixture; NimbleTrack-E Gen2 validated the tooling and the fabricated result. Once the first complete assembly was welded, the team scanned it against the customer's CAD model and drawing, reviewing distortion and deviation across the part together with flatness, perpendicularity and true position of holes.

If a sample was not yet where it needed to be, the scan evidence pointed to the next correction and the loop ran again. Because the same PolyWorks project held results from every sample, the team could see variation between iterations rather than ten isolated snapshots.

What that loop delivered:

Reporting time cut by up to 10×. One program and one report now cover what previously needed a setup and a report per part.

"Now we can handle all of that in a single program and report, which has cut our reporting time by up to ten times."
— Koushik Sujatha, New Product Introduction Engineer, TBI Manufacturing

Feedback reaches manufacturing sooner. Inspection projects are prepared from the drawing and CAD model before the first part is finished, then populated when the scan is complete.

Whole-part visibility replaces isolated measurements. Color-mapped CAD comparison shows how the entire scanned assembly relates to nominal—weld distortion included—while defined dimensions and GD&T controls are still reported.

More confident release decisions. Complete-part evidence supports the call on whether a sample is ready to send to the customer.

Closer collaboration with customers. Many of TBI's customers already use the same inspection software, so TBI can share its reporting structure with them directly during product introduction.

"The speed at which we can generate reports is a big plus. The color mapping makes it much more visual, so we can compare exactly where we are against where we need to be."
— Mark Tanner, Commercial Director, TBI Manufacturing

What's next. With a busy pipeline of new projects, TBI expects NimbleTrack-E Gen2 and PolyWorks to stay central to new product development. The next step is to involve more of the quality team, so current production parts can also be validated on the shop floor when required.

Is this the right fit for your shop?

This workflow applies when:

• You develop tooling, fixtures and first-off samples for welded, bent-tube or sheet-metal assemblies and go through several sample iterations per project.
• Weld distortion or spring-back affects the whole part, and you need to see it, not infer it from probed features.
• Reporting—not measurement—is what slows you down, and you inspect multiple samples of the same part.
• Parts are too large or too numerous to bring to a fixed measuring station, and you want to avoid applying targets for every scan.
• Your customers expect CAD-comparison evidence they can read and share.

Like TBI, most shops keep their existing measuring arm or CMM for the tasks it does well. The scanner adds whole-part visibility; it does not have to replace anything.

About SCANOLOGY NimbleTrack-E Gen2

NimbleTrack-E Gen2 is a wireless optical tracking 3D measurement system: a handheld i-Scanner tracked by an i-Tracker, with an optional i-Probe for contact measurement. The specifications relevant to this application are below; figures are from the SCANOLOGY NimbleTrack Gen2 data sheet.

Accuracy figures are evaluated under ISO 17025 accreditation based on JJF 1951 and VDI/VDE 2634 Part 3. Scan data is processed in SCANOLOGY DefinSight and exported in standard formats (.stl, .obj, .ply, .igs and others) for inspection software such as PolyWorks.

Talk to us about your application

If measurement, tooling validation or reporting is slowing your new product introduction, tell us about the part. We will show you how NimbleTrack-E Gen2 fits the way your team already works.

Contact SCANOLOGY

NimbleTrack Gen2 product page