Problem
A dairy foods manufacturer with plants across the United States needed a way to centralize quality data and reporting. The company had acquired its many facilities from different companies — and with them, various legacy systems and unique ways of doing things. Each plant had its own system for capturing quality data, including Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and paper-based ledgers and notebooks. Folks at the executive level had no clear view into the plants’ operations or quality, and no way to compare data across plants.
Proposed Solution
The manufacturer had five core requirements for a quality solution. It had to:
- enable documentation of quality inspection testing for both in-process and finished products;
- offer Statistical Process Control (SPC) tools that satisfied customer requirements;
- support a range of control plans and testing workflows;
- facilitate top-level reporting across production facilities; and
- have an open architecture for integration with other systems.
InfinityQS® ProFicient™ is the solution of choice to meet all these demands. ProFicient offers a real-time SPC focus and sufficient laboratory information management system (LIMS) capabilities to meet all regulatory documentation requirements. The solution can interface easily with lab equipment and manufacturing devices, and it offers a flexible, simple user interface for line operators.
Result
Because the company acquired its many plants from other companies, it faced a challenge in standardizing and streamlining operations, quality control, and reporting. We worked with the manufacturer’s quality team and determined that a quick win at a small production facility was just the ticket to prove our software’s worth to the organization. The pilot revealed that data entry was a key pain point, so we added a bar-coding solution to create sample labels that ProFicient can scan at data entry, eliminating manual data-entry errors and dramatically improving entry speed and user acceptance.
Before ProFicient, site-to-site evaluation for identical products was nearly impossible. ProFicient was crucial to the creation of standardized specifications. With a single click, the solution gives the powers-that-be the ability to generate a report, drill into real-time performance, and compare it against the newly defined specs. The elimination of “double-handling” data to produce reports resulted in a time savings of 1,000 hours per year — at a single site.
The real-time analytics capabilities ProFicient offers helped a single plant realize $1.5 million in savings versus budget from improved yield alone. Dunk a cookie in that!