A packaging company in the northeast United States faces challenges that are familiar to manufacturers in any industry:
- Reducing cost, scrap, and waste
- Improving workflow
- Increasing efficiency
- Maintaining—and improving—quality
- Meeting customer expectations
- Complying with regulatory requirements
However, packaging manufacturers must also contend with evolving customer demands such as increased product longevity, demands for more ecologically sustainable materials and sizes, and the rising cost of raw materials — all while constantly adapting and customizing their products for limitless types of products and uses.
In addition, while dynamically managing processes, the company must carefully monitor compliance to regulatory requirements for its own packaging products as well as the regulations governing customers’ products.
Proposed Solution
Regardless of industry, InfinityQS® ProFicient™ helps ensure the level of quality packaging manufacturers and their clients demand.
The company implemented ProFicient to monitor processes and run quality checks in real time, ensuring that finished products are always within controls. The deployment runs across all its lines and incorporates a combination of manual and automated data-collection methods to deliver data to the system’s Unified Data Repository. When quality data is centralized and standardized inside a single relational database, it is readily available to support critical quality-management activities including monitoring, notifications, alerting, and real-time and historical analytics.
To help ensure success with ProFicient, the company has put a strong emphasis on continuous training with the software. InfinityQS offers training courses that support beginning and advanced users, and training can be offered at the InfinityQS training center or at the client’s facility.
All of the packaging company’s operators and quality professionals are trained to use ProFicient and understand Statistical Process Control (SPC), so they can all work directly with the software. Managers receive the training directly from InfinityQS, then run their own training sessions to disseminate what they’ve learned to their floor workers.
Result
Hands-on training with the quality management software helps users at all levels make the most of all ProFicient’s features — and greater familiarity helps empower users to act on what they learn, facilitating continuous improvement.
ProFicient helps managers be more creative, too. They report that with ProFicient, they always know what’s happening on the shop floor. But they also go beyond just fixing issues, using the tools in ProFicient to conduct studies on processes that will hopefully lead to opportunities for improvement.
For example, by running plots and studies of aggregated historical data, managers can gather sufficient information to support transformative actions. They use ProFicient to improve existing products, model new products, and run pilots to determine the best process before a product moves into production. By increasing the sample size of study runs, managers can proactively refine processes to avoid problems in production.
ProFicient helps this packaging manufacturer embrace continuous improvement initiatives and maintain overall quality over a diverse product portfolio. With its emphasis on training, and by taking advantage of the automated warnings and reminders ProFicient offers, the whole organization can embrace a spirit of innovation that makes it a leader in a dynamic and competitive industry.