Problem: Quality Control Across Plants
In order to drive operational excellence, a leading North American consumer packaged Food and Beverage company required a way to collect real-time SPC data from various plant locations. As a result, it would be able to promote continuous improvement, decrease plant-to-plant manufacturing variations and reduce waste.
Proposed Solution: ProFicient SPC Software for Cloud-Based Access
The Food and Beverage leader selected InfinityQS® ProFicient™ on Demand (POD), an enterprise quality hub, powered by a Statistical Process Control (SPC) analytical engine. With POD’s cloud-based technology, the company is able to pull real-time manufacturing data from multiple locations into a secure, central repository so that its quality assurance (QA) team can access and respond quickly to fluctuations in data.
So for example, if a manufacturing plant is producing over or under its total solids specifications, quality professionals can instantaneously make adjustments—anytime, anywhere. And, if a facility is producing above target, the company knows that it is essentially giving away extra product, and can alter its processes as needed.
ProFicient on Demand is integrated with the manufacturer’s existing quality control measuring tools at three separate facilities. These tools send data directly to the enterprise quality hub, which assimilates and presents the information to users. In addition, ProFicient is integrated with an application that collects data from lab tests and instantaneously enters them into the database, thereby reducing paper and manual data entry.
Result: Quality Control Measures = Savings
Today, the Food and Beverage company is using InfinityQS ProFicient on Demand at six facilities and in its corporate lab. The company is not only collecting data in real time, but also using the power of cloud computing to react to variances and out-of-spec issues as they arise across different plants. From a centralized data repository, it is monitoring whether its facilities are producing above target, and can quickly make adjustments to prevent waste, reduce “giveaway,” and maintain a consistent taste profile.
With the ability to monitor and analyze real-time data from anywhere through POD, the company reported $2.1 million in savings due to waste reduction. That number is sustainable, year after year, with continued use of the SPC software.
Furthermore, the manufacturer is able to mine its collected data for Quality Intelligence to help identify areas for continuous improvement. POD’s flexible reporting capabilities and easy-to-use dashboards allow for the slicing and dicing of data in order to pinpoint new opportunities for improvement and perform predictive analyses. Plus, POD facilitates collaboration between facilities, as different locations can share their data to promote standardization and reduce plant-to-plant variations.
Looking forward, the company intends to use POD to identify additional opportunities for continuous improvement. It expects to extend the solution to other areas of the company, and plans to introduce tablets to extend POD’s data monitoring capabilities into the hands of the operators and other users outside the four walls