LKQ Corporation uses Groundlight AI to revolutionize quality control and inspection
Avi Geiger
LKQ Corporation, a prominent automotive parts provider and Fortune 500 company, leverages Groundlight’s AI
Groundlight's innovative approach to computer vision has revolutionized LKQ Corporation's engine rebuilding inspections, resulting in significant improvements in efficiency, accuracy, and cost savings.
Customer Profile
LKQ Corporation is a large automotive company with divisions specializing in the remanufacture and distribution of auto parts. At their engine rebuilding facility, they work on approximately 200 different types of engines, where engines are disassembled, remanufactured, and inspected before being sent out to customers as remanufactured engines.
The Problem
The final inspection task of aligning timing chains accurately presented a significant challenge for LKQ Corporation. Even with human inspectors, occasional errors can occur during the engine assembly process, creating a bad experience for customers and costly warranty replacements for LKQ. Engines are complex systems and it’s extremely difficult to monitor every potential mistake. It’s dramatically more cost-efficient to catch any mistakes while an engine is disassembled in the factory vs. assembled, shipped, and inside a customer’s vehicle.
types of alignment marks for different gear and chain combinations. No need to do any custom
programming or AI model development when new engines are introduced to the line or supplier
markings change.
LKQ can remanufacture over two-hundred different types of engines on the same line in their facility. They had been evaluating inspection cameras and software for over ten years, and none of the existing solutions could handle their high-mix inspection needs without hours of setup work for every new engine type.
Groundlight's Solution
Groundlight's AI-powered computer vision technology provided a cutting-edge solution to LKQ Corporation's quality control and inspection challenges. By integrating Groundlight’s Visual Inspections and Anomaly Detection software into cameras and edge modules alongside LKQ's existing infrastructure, Groundlight enabled real-time image capture and analysis, without any pre-existing dataset or tedious programming. Integrating into a Universal Robotics URCap plugin facilitated quick and flexible inspection programming for each engine type.
Groundlight's AI quickly learned to recognize timing chain alignment across different types of engines, continuously improving accuracy with each inspection, just like a new employee learning on the job.
Customized inspection reports generate required documentation and results can be integrated with MES, ERP, WMS, and other factory software systems.
Why Groundlight
Groundlight helps LKQ Corporation stay competitive in an industry increasingly powered by automation, robotics, and machine learning. Thanks to Groundlight's unique, human-in-the-loop escalation technology, LKQ can quickly set up new inspections, even for engines they’ve never encountered before, in as little as 10 minutes.
The Impact
The partnership with Groundlight has yielded significant benefits for LKQ Corporation. The system's robustness ensures that even in high mix assembly and high mix inspection environments, accuracy and efficiency are maintained. Further, Groundlight's URCap plugin opens opportunities for anyone operating on the Universal Robotics platform.
LKQ Corporation recognized Groundlight's system as a way to future-proof their inspection process and maintain a competitive edge in the industry.
“Groundlight lets us continuously inspect parts in our high-mix manufacturing operation that would otherwise be impractical to monitor. We’re able to catch defects long before they reach the customer and close the loop on process improvements to keep those defects from happening at all.”
- Justin Zipp, Quality Manager at LKQ Corporation
By leveraging Groundlight’s AI-driven quality control, LKQ has strengthened its reputation as a forward-thinking business, providing their customers with top-quality rebuilt engines and staying ahead in a dynamic and ever-evolving automotive industry.