Production engineering is well-placed to take advantage of a large number of vision system tools developed for other industries. As well as tolerance-checking on machined parts it is also possible to check for defects in parts such as scratches, cracks and missing/extra components.

There are also opportunities to use OCR (optical character recognition), data matrix (2-D barcodes) and 1-D barcodes to allow part tracibility throughout the production process and into customer usage. This allows faulty batches to be traced even after they have been delivered to customers and has become widely-used in the aerospace and automotive industries, where safety-critical components must be tracable.