Tracey McConnell, Director of Quality Assurance at Brooks Food Group, talks about how the InfinityQS® Statistical Process Control (SPC) solution, ProFicient™, helped her company manage the quality of their food products. Brooks is a manufacturer of breakfast items, appetizers, and chicken products. McConnell manages the quality managers and technicians as well as the company’s food safety programs. Critical to Brooks’ Quality Management is food safety, which includes microbiological and chemical programs, sanitary practices, and Good Manufacturing Practices.
McConnell explains that one of the most appealing aspects of ProFicient is its flexibility. Brooks is a small company but needed a raw material inspection, an SPC program, and a finished product program. In addition, they needed to be able to conduct chemical and microbiological analysis and analyze trend information using Pareto and box-and-whisker charts, histograms, and capability reports. When evaluating potential solutions, Brooks realized that ProFicient could provide all the functionality they needed while being easy to implement, fairly cost-effective, and easy to use.
Brooks Food Group is using ProFicient in a number of different ways. When raw materials arrive, teams are inspecting them with the AQL section of ProFicient and entering batching information. As raw materials are added or processed online, teams perform statistical process control work — both variables and defects — to improve their process. McConnell is really pleased with ProFicient’s reporting capabilities. Two of their favorite charts are the box-and-whisker and Pareto charts.
Brooks was pleased that implementation took less than one week and they were left with the tools to develop the system further. InfinityQS’s Application Engineer helped Brooks developed their projects during the implementation, but McConnell and her colleagues continued to create their own configurations based on their needs. Overall, McConnell is pleased with ProFicient, including the system, software, and services.