1. Introduction

Ningbo Fangzheng Automobile Mould Co., Ltd. (“Fangzheng”) is a leading Chinese manufacturer of large automotive moulds and components, specializing in body panel moulds such as side panels, doors, and fenders, serving major domestic and international automotive brands. With accelerating product iterations, lightweighting, and personalized designs, mould surfaces have become increasingly complex, significantly increasing development cycles and cost pressures. The traditional reliance on physical trial moulding and experience-based adjustments is no longer sustainable. Therefore, Fangzheng partnered strategically with Xi’an AEH Measurement Equipment Co., Ltd. (“AEH”) to fully introduce a precision mould inspection solution centered on “3D digital scanning” and an “intelligent data analysis platform.” This established a digital quality closed-loop covering design validation, trial adjustment, and mass production maintenance, fundamentally shifting from “experience-driven” to “data-driven,” leading the digital transformation of the automotive mould industry.

2. Case Background

Automotive body panel moulds are typical single-piece, customized, high-value products facing three core challenges:

• First, “black-box” trial adjustment: mould cavities are complex freeform surfaces requiring repeated trial pressing and manual grinding to eliminate interference and ensure part forming quality. This highly depends on the skill and experience of fitters, resulting in long cycles (often tens of days), high costs, and quality fluctuations.
• Second, lack of wear monitoring and life management: mould surface wear during mass production is gradual and invisible. Traditional methods cannot quantify it, often causing reactive shutdowns for major repairs after quality defects appear, leading to huge waste.
• Third, broken data chain and knowledge loss: mould modifications rely on visual and tactile inspection of trial parts; modification amounts cannot be accurately recorded or reproduced. Valuable repair experience remains with individual technicians, not transformed into standardized enterprise knowledge assets.
  Building a digital system that can “see” microscopic mould surface changes and precisely guide actions became crucial for Fangzheng to enhance core competitiveness.

3. Key Approaches

1. Concept Integration: Establishing a new paradigm of “full-surface digitization, data as repair instructions.”

The project completely overturned the traditional “mould-trial-visual judgment” cycle, establishing a digital new process of “mould-scanning-data comparison-precise grinding.” The core is converting the entire mould surface status into a fully computable and analyzable 3D digital model, making every modification location and removal amount clear at a glance. This aligns closely with AEH’s vision of empowering customers with “full measurement chain solutions” to achieve deterministic manufacturing.

2. Hard-Core Implementation: Deploying efficient blue-light laser scanning and non-contact measurement systems.

To achieve efficient, high-density data acquisition of large moulds, Fangzheng introduced AEH’s handheld blue-light laser 3D scanning system with these advantages:

• High efficiency and precision: can scan millions of points covering the entire cavity and cutting edge areas of a large car door mould within tens of minutes, with point cloud accuracy up to 0.02mm, fully capturing subtle edges and fillets.
• Strong environmental adaptability: insensitive to mould surface color or reflectivity, no powder spraying or pretreatment needed, enabling direct scanning onsite or on machine tools, seamlessly integrating into existing workflows.
• Composite measurement technology support: key features like datum holes and locating surfaces are precisely measured using portable CMM probes, fused with scanning data to ensure global coordinate accuracy.

3. Software-Driven: Building an intelligent closed-loop of “scanning-comparison-analysis-decision.”

Massive point cloud data is processed by AEH’s NET·DMIS measurement software core:

• 3D color deviation analysis: software automatically aligns and precisely compares scanned mould point clouds with original CAD models, generating intuitive color deviation maps—red indicates excess material, blue indicates interference, green indicates compliance. Repair technicians no longer guess but grind precisely based on color maps, reducing adjustment iterations by an average of 60%.
• Wear trend monitoring and predictive maintenance: during mass production, key surfaces are regularly scanned. The EMRP intelligent quality management platform stores historical scans and automatically analyzes material wear rates in specific areas. When predicted wear exceeds safety thresholds, it issues warnings guiding preventive maintenance during production gaps, avoiding unplanned downtime and scientifically extending mould overhaul life by 30%.
• Digital mould archives and knowledge base: all scans, comparison reports, and modification records from T0 trials to each repair are archived in the EMRP platform, forming a complete “digital twin history.” This facilitates problem tracing and, through big data analysis, summarizes mould design optimization suggestions and repair process packages for different materials and structures, enabling continuous knowledge retention and reuse.

4. Lessons Learned

The successful digital inspection system at Ningbo Fangzheng Automobile Mould provides a clear path for the capital- and technology-intensive mould industry to reduce cost, improve quality, and increase efficiency through digital transformation. It proves that combining “composite measurement technology” for microscopic geometric big data with “intelligent software platform” analytical decision-making can fundamentally change traditional manufacturing reliant on personal experience.

The project’s direct economic benefit is significant: shortening large body panel mould debugging cycles from the industry average of 45 days to 28 days, greatly reducing new car development time and cost. More profoundly, it makes moulds, as heavy assets, fully transparent, controllable, and predictable. Enterprises shift from passive response to mould failures to proactive mould health management. The “Fangzheng-AEH” cooperation model sets an industry benchmark, and its core concept of “digital inspection driving manufacturing closed-loop” has broad reference significance for advanced manufacturing involving complex surface processing and assembly, such as aerospace and high-end consumer goods, representing a perfect epitome of intelligent manufacturing in process optimization.