The Pequod of literary legend sailed for three years in search of Moby Dick; Ford’s new “Portable Quality Assurance Device”?which, we’re predicting, will take the acronym PQAD?has a much shorter time horizon. It’s an Android smartphone with a special app designed to streamline assembly-line quality checks, shaving seven seconds per car off the process and saving its workers up to one kilometer of walking per day?take that, Fitbit!

The PQAD works thusly: As cars pass by the quality check person, an Android phone on their wrist calls up relevant quality-check parameters for each car via a specially designed app. It even enables the checkers to record the quality results on the fly?or stop the line from their watch should something have been assembled incorrectly.
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Previously, the same task required the quality checkers to physically walk up and down the line to different cars, matching vehicles to a paper checklist. In addition to cutting time and steps, Ford reckons PQAD reduces quality-check errors by seven percent. So far, the Portable Quality Assurance Device is only assuring quality, portably, at Ford’s Valencia, Spain, manufacturing facility. Still, given the Valencia plant’s scal...