Use Data to Build Your Quality Manufacturing Strategy
At the most fundamental level, quality manufacturing hinges on quality checks. Data collected through quality checks is used to measure product and process quality, pinpoint places where operations can improve, and inform future strategies.
In order for quality checks to deliver meaningful insights, they have to be accurate, timely, complete, and appropriate. Leveraging statistical process control (SPC), manufacturers can hone in on the right metrics to watch and ensure data collection is consistent and precise—and that it’s providing needed information to make good business decisions.
InfinityQS SPC-based quality management solutions enable data collection options that help ensure key quality actions are attended to, whether that’s data collection, analysis, or investigation. With InfinityQS, operators are empowered to perform necessary quality checks and can take immediate steps to protect product quality.
Paper-based manufacturing quality checks are a costly option. Modernizing data collection saves more than you think.
How to Control Quality in Manufacturing? It Starts with Data
To make good decisions, you need good data. How do you collect the right information to assess and improve your quality manufacturing processes?
Compared to digital solutions, paper-based SPC data collection is expensive, inefficient, and even risky. Paper-based data collection is fraught with the potential for error and requires significant human resources to complete lower-value tasks, like managing supplies and filing or retrieving documents.
Gleaning usable information from a stack of papers—or dozens of spreadsheets—is costly too. Using paper, critical information is inaccessible, leading to missed opportunities to reduce risk, waste, or defects because the analytical process is too cumbersome and time-consuming.
Software Simplifies Data Collection
SPC-based quality software simplifies data collection and speeds up important quality checks, supporting streamlined data intake, reporting, and analysis with little to no IT involvement. In addition, modern quality solutions integrate into your existing quality workflows and manufacturing processes.
Because quality control in manufacturing is constantly evolving, modern quality management solutions allow for a mix of manual, semi-automated, and fully automated data collection.
- Manual—Data collection can easily shift from pencil and paper to keyboards, touchscreens, or barcodes and become part of the “bigger picture.”
- Semi-automated—Operators can use connected scales, calipers, gauges, and custom devices to collect quality information when they’re on the plant floor.
- Fully Automated—Data from enterprise resource planning systems, automated test equipment, programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and “smart” sensors can feed directly into your InfinityQS quality improvement system without operator intervention.
No matter how or when data is collected, InfinityQS stores everything in a central data repository, along with the time, date, and shift. Once data is entered, anyone who’s responsible for quality—from operators to executives—can access, analyze, and act on the information.
Quality Alerts: Stay Focused on Quality, Not the Clock
Software brings standardization and consistency to quality checks, especially for time-based collections. Built-in alerts and scheduled reminders ensure that every timed check occurs on schedule, regardless of plant, shift, or machine. InfinityQS supports timed quality checks with:
- countdown clocks that monitor the schedule
- automatic notifications when checks are due
- manager notifications when a check is missed
- automatic assignment of rechecks or operator validation when data falls out of specification
Disciplined Data Collection, Flexible Management
When collection requirements or processes change, it’s easy to adapt digital collection processes and cascade that information throughout the organization. Managers simply adjust the data-collection requirements in the software, and they can include relevant information and instructions in the quality check notifications.
Testing requirements and standard operating procedures (SOPs) can be managed in the same way. Once the requirements and notification schedules are established, the software will trigger compliance workflows and automatically save data from the plant floor to a central repository.
Collect the Right Data, Right Now
Do you have the information you need to make strategic decisions and improve quality? InfinityQS software makes it easier to collect, access, and analyze the right information for your quality improvement journey.
Move Faster While Improving Product Quality in Manufacturing
When InfinityQS helped a semiconductor manufacturer transition from manual to software-based data collection, the company went from multiple, duplicate collection steps to one. Streamlining quality checks enabled the company to:
- Save time and simplify operator processes
- Improve the accuracy and timeliness of quality data
- Quickly identify and correct errors
- Improve operator morale
- Identify opportunities to learn and improve
A manufacturing engineer at the company said the whole manufacturing atmosphere changed “from the drudgery of manually recording data and sending it into a black hole to a feeling of ownership as people instantly saw their names and the data they entered.”
“As the projects and operators advance, we only expect to move faster and faster—with the same integrity,” he said.
Read the Case Study
Proving Quality Check Compliance: Hit the “Easy Button” on Audits
Industry audits are high-stakes events. SPC software can ease some of the stress by making data collection, storage, and retrieval a cinch.
- InfinityQS makes it quick and easy to prove that quality checks were completed correctly and on time.
- Reports can be customized (e.g., by shift, day, or event) and produced in minutes, since all of your quality data are held in a centralized and standardized repository.
- Information can be accessed from anywhere, anytime.
A purpose-built quality management solution can reduce audit prep and reporting time from days or weeks to mere minutes.