Although he’s not one for clichés, Rus Emerick, process improvement specialist at Schneider-Electric, endorses this one: “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

This concept, which dates back to Aristotle, is at the core of an approach called functional analysis that has implications throughout Schneider-Electric, a company with nearly 90,000 employees in 130 countries.

According to Emerick, functional analysis at Schneider-Electric took a quantum leap with the feature-inspection capabilities in Geomagic Qualify software. The software enables users to quickly detect, create, and inspect geometrical features for tasks such as calculating size, analyzing fit, comparing 2-D and 3-D features, and measuring point-to-point and feature-to-feature distances and angles.

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