The demands on manufacturers in the current marketplace are complex. Success hinges on manufacturing processes that are highly optimized to ensure the greatest efficiency and a quick response as well as promote standardization across all products, lines, and facilities.
InfinityQS
® Enact
® addresses these needs by defining every process with a
process model.
What Is a Process Model?
The process model is a graphical representation of the transformation of materials and components into the finished product your company manufactures. It consists of three elements:
- Part families: The inputs and outputs of your process
- Operations: The activity or alteration you perform on the input parts to produce an output
- Data collections: The measurements and information you record about part features and the results of operations
Take the example of a cookie bakery: Baking process Operations (mixers, depositors, and ovens) consume inputs (flour, eggs, and butter) to produce an output (cookies). Makes sense, right? But, Enact takes the concept of the process model to the next level.
The Enact Process Model
The process model is the foundational backbone of Enact, a cloud-based Quality Intelligence platform that offers manufacturers unparalleled visibility into their quality data and, as a result, into the operational consistency of their processes. The Enact process model captures a true representation of the manufacturing process.
In Enact, part recipes and the process model enable you to collect, analyze, and present quality and process data in the context of the actual manufacturing process. It gives you a way to see and understand all the pieces of your real, working operation.
With Enact implemented in your manufacturing facility, you gain visibility into all parts of your manufacturing processes across products, lines, shifts, and even sites. In addition, the platform standardizes, centralizes, and aggregates the quality data you’re collecting so that you can analyze it and use that enterprise-wide visibility in a very practical way to make meaningful transformation happen in your business.
Facilitate Collaboration
Once you’ve created a process model in Enact, you can share that model among sites to ensure manufacturing best practices are followed. Process Models can be modified and scaled to support any number of products and processes without having to reinvent the proverbial wheel.
In addition, the Enact Process Model connects workers to processes, so users automatically receive the most recent process performance information, data-collection reminders, alarms, and event notifications about the processes for which they’re responsible.
Whatever their role—Quality, Operations, IT, or Management—users are better informed and prepared to take action when required. Through a highly visual, customizable dashboard, users see precisely the information they need when and where they need it.
Efficiency Improved
In particularly complex manufacturing organizations, no one person can know everything about every input, transformation, or output. But, when you have a detailed and complete process model, you can identify points in the process where you need to call on expert knowledge to determine what’s missing and what’s needed to increase quality and efficiency.
By looking at the process model, operators and managers can see both the inputs to the part of the process they’re responsible for and the next step in the process. Through customized dashboards, those users can make adjustments based on the quality of inputs to maximize the quality of their operation for the next transformation in the model. In addition, as more and more process-specific users chime in and add their expertise, the process model is adjusted and refined, which leads to greater efficiency in the process and higher product quality.
Enact makes manufacturing more efficient and empowers users to contribute to high-quality products through:
- the details the process models provide
- the ability for process models to scale to manufacturing operations of any size
- the standardized and consistent data collection practices
- the visibility they give users at all levels of the organization
The Enact platform is centered on quality improvement within manufacturing and will evolve and adapt to meet the needs of an ever-widening range of industries and applications.