In manufacturing, improving product quality and operating efficiently are your top goals. But paper-based checklists, spreadsheets, and siloed data prevent visibility across production lines and plants. If you’re a quality manager with many production lines, or plants in many regions, your back is against the wall if you use a paper-based system.
Leadership takes notice when a particular line or plant operates more efficiently than others. When the company execs ask you what is causing these disparities, you should be able to easily answer. Right? But, if your crucial plant data is stranded in isolation, then chances are you can’t compare lines or plants—and that’s paralyzing your overall product quality…and your process improvement efforts as well.
Time to make a change. But to what?
A cloud-based digital quality management solution is the answer. It’s time to make the move to the cloud because a cloud-based software system will provide your organization with the means with which to shed the dead weight of your paper-and-spreadsheet system—with ease and without costing you a fortune.
Benefits of the Cloud
Your stakeholders need to see the light when it comes to your company’s quality management needs. In order to obtain their buy-in for a move away from paper, you need to get your ducks in a row: gather information that supports a move to a digital solution. You need to clearly show the benefits of moving to the cloud for your quality management system. And that starts with deployment and scalability…
Simple Deployment and Scalability
“Cloud systems offer faster deployments and reduced deployment risk. Why? Because there are no servers to buy, configure, and maintain,” states colleague Jim Frider, InfinityQS Senior Product Marketing Manager, in his blog,
Cloud-Hosted Quality Systems Just Make Sense. He adds: “There’s no risk because you don’t have to invest heavily in hardware just to get the ball rolling. You never have to worry about making the big hardware purchase and investing your IT team’s time to configure everything…only to find that there are several major roadblocks to clear before you can actually use the system. There is no need to update your local systems when a new version of your quality software is released.”
Cloud technology is offered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The SaaS model supports easy scalability as needs change. Pay only for what you need and expand/contract your deployment as your business needs evolve.
Enhanced Visibility and Collaboration
Bringing all your data together in a centralized data repository is a game-changer for manufacturers. Easily view and compare process capability and performance across all processes, lines, and plants. Regardless of the data source, a cloud-based quality management system stores all your data in a centralized repository from which it can be configured, aggregated, analyzed, and compared. Centralized data can be analyzed in aggregate across the company and compared between lines, departments, and sites, to gain valuable insights into manufacturing operations.
Access from Any Device
Browser-based software means easy access for users—anytime, anywhere. All they need is an internet-connected device and they’re good to go. In addition, your workforce is not tied to the plant as they have been in the past, either. Remote working, vital in today’s manufacturing climate, is a breeze with centralized data. Everyone has access to real-time data and analysis whenever, wherever they need it.
Reduced Quality Management Costs
Save money on hardware and free up valuable IT resources with simple system management in the cloud. As Jim Frider notes in his aforementioned blog, “With a SaaS solution, there are no costly server hardware replacements...When the hardware needs replacing, the folks who operate and maintain the cloud do all that.” Costs go down substantially when you operate in the cloud.
Simplified Compliance
Pull detailed audit reports in minutes—not hours—and ensure you’re staying compliant while processes are running. Doug Fair, InfinityQS COO, speaks at length on compliance in his
data collection blog: “It's extremely difficult to create reports from data that's written on paper. To do so, you've got to transcribe numbers into spreadsheets. Again, you're dealing with written numbers and the potential for human error. Data could be lost or mistyped. If data from the paper is illegible, what should be done with it? Plus, numbers could accidentally be transposed or erroneously entered in a spreadsheet. Even if data could be perfectly transcribed, you still have to figure out how to create reports from the data. Basically, using paper is a mess.” A move to the cloud mitigates this paper issue and puts you in the driver’s seat for audits and reporting.
Professional Services & Support
One way to ensure a successful move to the cloud is by partnering with a software vendor that offers
professional services and support. If a software solution includes support services in licensing subscription costs, that’s a
valuable bonus. And it sends a clear signal that the organization is truly
customer focused.
Here’s what to expect from InfinityQS services and support:
- Fast deployment: With cloud systems, implementation is streamlined—and hardware costs are greatly reduced because you don’t need to purchase, store, or maintain servers.
- Purchase only what you need: As mentioned, SaaS offers flexible license management. Simply add or subtract licenses as your needs change—a huge money saver.
- Eliminate upgrades & ongoing maintenance: Cloud systems ensure that the latest version of software is always available to users. The SaaS vendor is responsible for maintaining your system—and updates happen seamlessly and automatically. In addition, if you operate within an industry that requires software validation whenever it is upgraded or updated, InfinityQS offers a dedicated version of our ProFicient™ cloud software—see this blog for details.
- Immediate access: Intuitive, cloud-based SPC quality solutions promote reusing system configurations. This saves administrator time and effort—and aids in naming standardization, data collection, and monitoring strategies.
- Security: Cloud solutions include built-in security protections—including robust disaster recovery protocols and 24/7 monitoring for security threats. Cloud data centers offer advanced security configurations to ensure that your data is safe—and only accessible by you.
Data Collection, Monitoring, & Analysis
Cloud technology presents exciting opportunities to make data collection and analysis quicker—and more efficient. InfinityQS puts decades of experience to work with these three critical areas of quality management:
- Data collection: Cloud-hosted quality management solutions enable diversified data collection—manual, semi-automatic, and fully automatic.
- Real-time monitoring & alerts: Automated notifications enable you to spot and correct issues as they happen—minimizing scrap and waste, improving product quality compliance, and lowering the chances of costly recalls or defects.
Furthermore, your cloud-based SPC system's real-time notifications should:
- Be flexible and make it easy to schedule consistent quality checks
- Warn users if data collections didn't occur on time
- Capture responses to issues, including documentation of the cause and action taken
- Notify users based on role
- Automated workflows: Cloud-based systems alert users when an action is required—and highlight what steps need to be taken to address a situation.
Data From Anywhere
Having the ability to look at data from across your entire enterprise in its summary form (in aggregate) is critical. It enables your quality pros to dig into the data and uncover the greatest opportunities for improvements in your operations. The
unified data repository is at the center of almost all the transformative benefits you can glean from the cloud.
In your average manufacturing environment, there are lots of machines and data collection devices, each speaking its own unique language. You need a system that can hear what each device is saying, translate it into a common language (or format),
and store everything in one place. Then, when it comes time to put it all together, all that data
from across your enterprise is easily rolled up and summarized—ready to become information that you can use to improve business performance.
Reporting
When you move quality management to the cloud, you gain the power to access and use vital information whenever you need it. Let’s take a quick deep dive into specific InfinityQS quality management solution reporting capabilities:
- Contextual, visual data: Deliver the right data—in the right context—to every user (and stakeholder).
- Real-time reports: Gain visibility into quality compliance. Real-time data is actionable, so production personnel can quickly address issues, uncover areas for improvement, reduce waste, and help increase your profit margin.
- Exception-based reporting: This feature saves time in two ways:
- Process monitoring: Exception-based reporting automatically monitors data streams. When significant variances occur, an operator or manager is alerted to act.
- Audits: With all this data in one place, it’s simple to supply auditors with whatever information they request.
These reporting capabilities enable your teams to monitor quality compliance across your production assets; easily create meaningful reports, charts, and graphs; provide increased visibility into the performance of your manufacturing processes; enable your teams to discover areas for continuous improvement initiatives; and provide management with the ability to make better, data-driven decisions that lead to transformation.
In Closing
Quality is moving to the cloud, and successful companies know it’s not a matter of if—but when. Cloud-based software enables you to painlessly and quickly step away from the quagmire of a paper-based system and into the bright future of a digital transformation. Take advantage of the technology at your fingertips today: contact one of our account managers (1.800.772.7978 or
via our website) for more information.