Mark Schieldge, Vice President of Quality Innovations at Snak King, talks about how InfinityQS® ProFicient™ helps his company manage quality. Snak King produces snack foods and is focused on providing healthier snack options for customers. Before implementing ProFicient, the company experienced wide swings in product quality because operators were not using true Statistical Process Control (SPC) decision-making rules. This resulted in unreliable product consistency and increased waste. The company experienced frequent product quality holds and process aborts.
When evaluating SPC solutions, Snak King’s evaluation criteria included ease of use for operators as well as a solution that would provide actionable data. Although they evaluated several competitors, they discovered that most solutions focused specifically on SPC; but InfinityQS’s solution, ProFicient, offers visibility of a wide range of data, from customer complaint tracking to incoming receiving tracking to quality inspections. Schieldge points out that ProFicient is much more than just an SPC tool; it is a total Quality Management system.
ProFicient has allowed Snak King to really look at data, especially process variability data, which enables the company to re-engineer the process to improve quality. For Snak King, this has resulted in a 30% improvement in customer complaints. They have also reduced product waste by more than $1 million compared to the previous year.
According to Schieldge, ProFicient has exceeded the company’s expectations. They were looking for an SPC tool, but ProFicient is a total Quality Management solution that has given Snak King an edge in the snack industry.