The manufacturing world is very competitive. We all know that. And we’re all looking for an edge. An advantage. Something that can make just a small difference in the consistency of our processes…in the quality of our products. Which leads me to
ProFicient™, InfinityQS' quality management software, and the power of its real-time shop floor data capture capabilities.
Shop Floor Data Capture
So, what’s different about ProFicient? Well, to begin with, it was designed to be very flexible and efficient to use. Those two descriptors don’t usually go together, I know—especially when you talk about software—but with ProFicient they do. To begin our discussion of the “ProFicient advantage,” let’s look at shop floor data capture.
We know that there are thousands of different ways of doing data collection. ProFicient simplifies data entry for operators, both manual and semi-automated—and the software even supports fully automated shop floor data capture. That’s flexible. ProFicient is optimized for shop floor usage because
InfinityQS is a company that was born from the shop floor, and our people have lived on those shop floors. So, we know a manufacturing advantage when we see one.
Shop Floor Data – Simplicity Matters
Simplicity is important…and it’s an advantage. We understand the desire to ensure that your quality management system is very simple for operators to work with—and fast—because operators are incredibly busy people. Therefore, it behooves software companies to make operator interfaces incredibly simple. Everything needs to be automatic: data capture, alarming, charting, reporting, communications, emails. In our quality management software, it’s all automatic—to support the operator in their efforts to deliver consistently high-quality products. ProFicient is a flexible, feature-rich software system that's incredibly simple for operators to use on the shop floor—it’s a big differentiator between us and our competitors in the marketplace.
Configurations Simplified
Another huge differentiator is configurations. Our customers can create their own configurations for how their quality data is collected, and what data is analyzed on the shop floor. A single configuration can be used for data analysis across multiple products, multiple production lines, multiple shifts, even multiple plants. And that is an enormous differentiator between us and our competitors.
This means that a
single configuration can support even the operator who switches to different products codes a dozen times during their shift. In fact, that one configuration can be used across multiple production lines. And even though the product codes change on those production lines multiple times during a shift, it just doesn't matter. What that ultimately means is that not only are the configurations easy for the operators to use, but (perhaps just as importantly) they’re easy for administrators to create.
And if you have thousands of product code and hundreds of production lines, you can manage those kinds of deployments with a handful of configurations. That is a big difference between InfinityQS quality management software and other products. It means
just a few configurations need to be created by the administrator.
It also means that when changes inevitably occur in the manufacturing process, or additional features need to be checked, new part numbers created, new production lines built, or new plants purchased, the administrator only has to change or modify a few configurations.
Shop Floor Data Collection Software in Action
Our engineers were in a medical device facility a few years ago—where they were making screws for surgeons performing spinal surgeries. Because all human bodies are so different, the screws had 10,000 different part numbers—
10,000 different unique screws were manufactured in this one department. This department had nine different screw-making machines, and each one could make any of those 10,000.
Well, as it turns out, they were using a competitor's software product and this product
required a single configuration for each part number, which meant they had over 10,000 different setups, different configurations. Actually, it was worse than that because every single screw machine was unique, too—in other words, they each have their own unique personalities. Because SPC is about controlling those processes, in this case screw machines, they had to create a separate, unique configuration for each and every part, and then each and every machine it ran on. So, that boils down to this: more than
90,000 configurations to manage the data collection and analysis for nine screw machines and 10,000 part numbers. And that was just one department within this enormous plant.
When we came in, we showed them that with one single InfinityQS ProFicient configuration,
one single configuration, they could enter data for any of those 10,000 part numbers on any of their nine different screw machines—
one single configuration managed it all. I’m happy to report that this company then replaced the competitor's product with ours. I think it’s safe to say that this is an enormous differentiator for our software.
Big Data Visibility
For most organizations, a big challenge is data
visibility. Because ProFicient can be used in an
on-demand, cloud-based environment, we have the ability to create cross-plant reports and analyses to provide the visibility that the corporate quality people crave and simply do not have today.
Our product uses proprietary algorithms for aggregated data so that even product codes with different specification limits, different means and standard deviations, even those products that are vastly different from one another, can be fairly compared so that quality professionals and other non-technical personnel are provided information in a very-easily-understood format. In other words, you don't have to be a statistician to use our software because these proprietary algorithms make it easy to consume the information.
Automated Data Collection – No Challenge is Too Great
I’d also like to note that we’ve developed a series of APIs to integrate with and collect data in an automated fashion from a wide array of manufacturing systems.
Whether ERP or MES systems, custom-built database systems, inline data collection systems, handheld data collection devices, sampling—all of this is built into our automated data collection software.
Dynamic Quality Management Software Makes a Difference
You want to keep up with the competition in this constantly evolving manufacturing landscape. We’re all looking for an edge—an advantage—something that can make just a small difference in the consistency of our processes and in the quality of our products. When you need an advantage, all roads lead to ProFicient, InfinityQS’ proven quality management software.
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.