A household name in the medical products industry is realizing incredible speed improvements and labor time savings with WinSPC.
The software’s automated dashboard views automatically retrieve and display plant-wide production metrics as the facility churns along, giving workers and management visibility of trends and awareness of new problems. Previously, these views were manually retrieved report-style from a SQL database, a slow, latent, and costly process.
The American-based company began as a small workshop with high hopes. In the early 1900s, President Theodore Roosevelt awarded the company a large government commission to develop its products for the military. Hopes fulfilled, the outfit today is one of the world’s largest suppliers of medical instruments in its industry, with over 10,000 employees and facilities in 30+ countries around the globe.
In the company’s operations, WinSPC has proven versatile for its ability to connect, through ODBC communication protocol, to the company’s central production database, which in turn receives product measurements and attributes from the company’s “CAMS” database, ensuring FDA compliance.
This ability of WinSPC to capture production information from the existing database indirectly rather than directly from the production line as in a typical setup allowed the company to save the effort of straying from its existing methods while applying its real-time SPC solution.
The medical products company has lots of production lines and analyzes extensive silos of product characteristic information. Because of this, it was not only important to connect to all that data, but to view it in a useful way. To achieve this, WinSPC dashboards were installed to show key process metrics and comparisons in single big-screen views that update as the facility turns out product. WinSPC’s Plant Monitor, which visually conveys production line health plant-wide, was also installed to acheive this end. In fact, WinSPC was chosen over competitors for its ability to capture the facility’s large number of line/shift/batch designators.
WinSPC also gives the company insight into sources of waste by comparing the frequency of given known assignable causes. Floor operators are prompted to do investigation and provide assignable cause information when the production process demonstrates a statistical anomaly, ultimately resulting in dollars saved over a vast portfolio of products.
The company experienced a relatively fast and easy setup of WinSPC. This characteristic of WinSPC was another reason it was chosen over competing real-time SPC solutions. Additionally, the company’s capturing of some production data is now automatic, requiring no human interaction beyond the initial setup.