Problem
A major pharmaceutical company wants to improve efficiency and expand capacity to manufacture new products at one of its primary facilities without having to physically expand the plant.
Proposed Solution
The site is using InfinityQS® ProFicient™ on a limited number of its manufacturing lines. An InfinityQS Application Engineer performed a multiday gap analysis that revealed the plant has been using ProFicient at only 10% capacity. The Application Engineer suggested that by rolling out ProFicient to achieve 100% utilization and piloting the solution’s Data Management System (DMS) software and Data Collection Service (DCS), data collection can be automated, enabling targeted, strategic analysis and improved efficiency — without requiring an additional investment by the manufacturer.
Result
Without a facility-wide Statistical Process Control (SPC) standard, it is impossible for the manufacturer to have a clear sense of overall process efficiency. When the plant starts collecting and storing data from all its product lines, production managers will have a much better idea of the plant’s overall operating efficiency and the utilization and efficiency of individual manufacturing lines. Armed with that information, they can:
- roll out new products to underutilized lines;
- increase production capacity (and thus profits);
- increase the efficiency of existing manufacturing lines to reduce waste;
- better understand where and when manufacturing defects are occurring; and
- automate many of the processes that workers currently perform manually.
Ultimately, the pharmaceutical company intends to use this plant as a template for its SPC standard and a model for its manufacturing facilities worldwide. With ProFicient and DMS/DCS, it can do just that.