Audience: Quality engineers, quality technicians, and metrology teams running recurring FAIs.
Why this matters
Most teams do not lose time on one hard step. They lose time across many small handoffs: opening PDFs, ballooning, retyping dimensions, validating units, and cleaning spreadsheet formats. The checklist below reduces that variability so your first article inspection process stays consistent.
9-step checklist
- Confirm drawing revision, part number, and customer context before extraction.
- Validate that the source is PDF and pages are legible at inspection zoom levels.
- Apply a single balloon numbering convention (left-to-right, top-to-bottom, or feature-grouped).
- Capture each characteristic once, then map directly to one FAI row ID.
- Standardize nominal/tolerance formatting (decimal places, plus/minus style, units).
- Flag ambiguous callouts early (stacked limits, mixed units, partial dimensions).
- Run a reconciliation pass: balloon count equals populated rows in the Excel workbook.
- Export audit-ready outputs (ballooned PDF plus XLSX).
- Store outputs with revision tags and retention policy labels for traceability.
Quality control checks before release
- No duplicate balloon IDs in the drawing.
- No empty required FAI fields in the output workbook.
- Units and tolerance symbols match the source print.
- All generated files are tied to the same revision marker.
When to automate
If your team is processing repeated first article inspections and spending hours in spreadsheet cleanup, automation usually pays back quickly. Start with one repeatable family of parts and measure: cycle time, correction rate, and handoff quality.
Need a starter template first? Get the free FAI Starter Pack.