The client
A Thai industrial manufacturer producing components for the regional automotive supply chain. Around three hundred staff. Three production lines running two shifts each. Quality control reporting was a Friday afternoon ritual that the QC manager had been doing personally for over a decade.
The problem
Inspection data was captured on paper at each station, then re-entered into Excel by the QC manager every Friday. The weekly summary report took her about six hours to produce. By the time it surfaced any pattern (an uptick in a specific defect category on a specific line), the issue was already a few hundred parts deep.
The approach
The paper checklist got replaced with a tablet at each inspection station, feeding directly into Airtable. Each shift’s inspections landed in real time. n8n watched the data nightly. An LLM looked at the latest twenty-four hours, compared against rolling baselines, and surfaced anything trending in a worrying direction. The output was a one-page morning summary in the QC manager’s inbox at six a.m., with the actionable patterns called out and the rest summarized in passing.
The Friday weekly report was now a mostly-finished draft by Friday morning, with the manager’s role reduced to writing the management commentary on top.
The result
QC reporting time for the manager dropped from around eight hours a week to about two. More importantly, defect patterns were now being caught within twenty-four hours instead of within a week, which meant interventions on the production lines happened before defect counts had run into the hundreds. Customer-side rejection rates dropped over the next quarter as a direct result.