Quality Control in the Commercial Brewing and Distilling Industries

Improve process control for enhanced profitability.

Most large-scale brewers and distillers already have a quality system in place. After all, your business and brand reputation rely on creating a high-quality, consistent experience for customers. But in these tightly regulated industries, your quality system must deliver more than a glorified database. You need superior visibility and insight into every facility so that you can meet a range of demands:

Meet regulatory standards for net content control
Improve data collection accuracy
Accurately and quickly respond to government and industry audits and inquiries
Comply with electronic records regulations
Track global supply and distribution
Reduce risk, waste, and costs and optimize yield, productivity, and profitability
Protect your brand

InfinityQS^® Statistical Process Control (SPC) software provides the strategic insight and process control that commercial brewers and distillers need to thrive.

Interrogating Data to Find More Savings

For brewers and distillers, who face severe repercussions for unreported overfill, net content control is vital. Underfill containers, and you risk running afoul of minimum fill regulations; overfill, and you face tax penalties.
InfinityQS software provides unparalleled visibility into your fill processes, giving you extremely granular control over net content.

Our Net Content Control feature supports both the U.S. Department of Commerce Maximum Allowable Variation (MAV) and European Union Tolerable Negative Error (TNE) and T1/T2 requirements.
Net Content Control reporting provides strategic insight across processes, lines, and facilities.

Real-time SPC software provides immediate insight into process problems, so that you can respond to production issues as quickly as possible. Yet many SPC products simply notify you when processes fall out of spec. InfinityQS solutions provide a more effective, reliable system:

Support automated, semi-automated, and manual data collection
Configure automated alerts and notifications to improve collection consistency
Reduce errors by skipping manual transcription
Speed access to data, both in real-time and days, weeks, months, or even years after collection
Improve analysis with a centralized data repository that enables insight across lines and facilities
Prioritize improvements through enterprise-wide visibility
Easily create reports to meet executive, customer, or auditor inquiries

Increased visibility—improved quality control for food

What is the cost of a paper-based quality data collection system?

With InfinityQS, audits are easier with instant access to the quality records and electronic documentation needed to demonstrate compliance. Our robust solution can stand up to third-party certification audits such as British Retail Consortium (BRC), Safe Quality Food (SQF), and ISO 22000—or internal audits. Creating reports takes only minutes instead of hours or days, eliminating the need for spreadsheets.

Dynamic Scheduler

You can specify unique, time-based intervals based on the product, process, or even the workstation. Windows automatically pop up, clearly identifying when data collections are due. If a failure is detected or if no data is collected, the software can automatically send notifications, email administrators, or even force users to specify assignable cause codes and corrective actions.

Learn more.

InfinityQS solutions boast built-in checklist and workflow alerting features needed to comply with Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) and Sanitation Standard Operating Procedures (SSOP). You can incorporate workflow requirements at the shop floor level, providing automatic data collection prompts to operators. InfinityQS’s real-time Dynamic Scheduler offers visual checklists to operators, reminding them when to perform HACCP, SSOP, and other critical quality checks.

When enabled, Reason for Change tracking provides full traceability for any modification, edit, or change to any database record. Traceability records are easily viewed in a variety of ways, but they cannot be edited. Whenever a record modification or deletion is attempted, the Reason for Change tracking feature forces users to select a reason for the modification from a drop-down list. Additionally, free-form comments are required. When specified, a Change History and Reason for Change Report can accompany any chart printout.

According to the US Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), the most common compliance issues during brewer audits relate to inaccurate or inaccessible records and reports. Quality systems that rely on paper records or on manual transcriptions of collected data into spreadsheets are prone to human error. Plus, files and records can be difficult to locate and retrieve in response to audits that occur after time has passed. InfinityQS solutions meet electronic record requirements.

Materials used in the production of a specific finished lot
Where incoming raw ingredients were consumed
Root causes of nonconforming lots
Information critical for responding to product recalls
Which final lots were created from incoming lots
Lot Genealogy reports provide a complete view of the incoming/outgoing product relationship with statistical summary information.

InfinityQS Lot Genealogy and Reporting functionality enables organizations to track raw material (ingredients) lot codes throughout Food and Beverage manufacturing operations. For investigation purposes, genealogical "trees" can be created for any lot. These reports allow you to determine:

Commercial brewers and distillers face an increasingly competitive industry landscape. InfinityQS solutions enable consistently high product quality while providing the process insight you need to optimize yield and streamline production. Our global solutions are effective in short-run and high-mix/low volume environments of all sizes. No matter how many products you produce or how many facilities you manage, InfinityQS solutions can meet your quality intelligence needs.

The immediate impact that InfinityQS ProFicient had and the awareness it created was tremendous, much more than I ever thought possible. Now we can look at operations as a whole and make big-picture decisions about what should be done going forward. Management is using data to make informed decisions and plan for the future.

Jim Hunkins
Quality Systems Development at Michael Foods Group, Inc.,

There are many advantages to having a computerized system that sometimes, in the fog of having this powerful tool with its many capabilities, one can over look.

Julie Chapman
Quality Systems Manager at Nestle Waters

It is ultimately easier for the operator. Even with the minimal computer skills many of the
operators had in the beginning, the overwhelming consensus is that they prefer using InfinityQS
over a paper system.

Julie Chapman
Quality Systems Manager at Nestle Waters