Background
Cochlear is the world's leading producer of Implantable Hearing Devices. Over the last 25 years, Cochlear has opened the doors to the world of sound for over 150,000 hearing impaired people ranging from infants to people in their late nineties. Cochlear products are inspired by the life-changing experience of assisting people to move from a world of silence to one full of sound and excitement. With a passion for innovation and quality, Cochlear is improving the quality of lives for people around the world.
Challenge
Cochlear was looking for a quality control solution that builds quality into production processes, rather than testing failures out. Cochlear needed a system to increase efficiency with a real-time data analysis to help them move past the paper based reporting system they had previously relied on.
Cochlear's primary objectives were to:
- Decrease build variability
- Reduce reliance on manual systems and paper-based records
- Proactively manage machine performance.
Solution
To achieve their process improvement goals, Cochlear decided to implement a modern, state-of-the-art Statistical Process Control (SPC) system-InfinityQS ProFicient software. ProFicient gives Cochlear automated real-time visual analysis of quality data. Rather than working through paper-based reports at the end of the day, quality managers are now free to focus on executing quality improvement.
Though Cochlear implemented a full scale project, Cochlear was impressed that Proficient's scalability gives them the ability to expand the software's capability as the company grows.
Results
ProFicient now helps Cochlear ensure that every unit is produced to the same exacting standard. The minute that ProFicient detects deviation, shop floor operators take immediate and prudent action that keep manufacturing processes up to Cochlear's high standards. This ensures that Cochlear produces the highest quality Implantable Hearing Devices since processes are fine-tuned before valuable time and materials go into producing goods that will have to be scrapped.
With ProFicient, Cochlear's quality managers can now review historical quality records, analyze Assignable Cause Codes, and Corrective Action Codes, all in real time. Cochlear has been able to apply ProFicient's Pareto Analysis and Multi-Part Pareto Analysis tools to help drive down build variability. InfinityQS' million-way analysis gives Cochlear the unique capacity to retrieve information from a database with limitless queries, creating an infinite amount of real-time combinations of quality data in 300 different types of charts. With these capabilities, Cochlear has driven down build variability.
