Quality Control: Systems and Performance
Scrap, waste, and rework are some areas that influence the throughput of a company’s manufacturing process and, more importantly, the bottom line. If any one of these areas is lagging you can expect to see a dip in overall plant performance.
In order to mitigate such risks and help ensure consistent products Engineering offers full quality systems. Quality systems help to monitor the production process in order to identify and predict issues in order to cut down on the amount of waste. Through combining software modules such as at-line/in-line testing, electronic work instructions, electronic work flows, corrective actions, alarms, statistical process control (SPC), and LIMS, a company can achieve the following functionality and more:
- System enforces mandatory checks and executes routine calculations ensuring complete accountability of required test/procedures
- Violations are automatically identified and trigger immediate corrective action processes
- Documentation is complete, with electronic signatures captured when required
- Auditors, supervisors, and other personnel are notified of critical limit deviations and regulatory violations
- Approval process (e.g. HACCP, Label compliance, weights) ensures that checks have been done properly before product is released
- Lot records are kept against process orders (prod schedules) with full genealogy of materials used for accurate and speedy recovery
- Traceability information is rapidly available
Levering on such functionality helps to answer market challenges such as linking quality operations to actual production operations and improving regulatory compliance by fostering a company’s commitment to sound controls, quality management practices and effective compliance to ensure product integrity throughout the product life cycle.
Engineering’s quality systems adhere to compliance standards such as 21 CFR Part 11 and provide real time feedback to the management during production, helping them react sooner to issues which arise during production.
Below is a list of benefits often realized with a electronic quality system:
- Yield improvement by 10%
- High reduction of production scrap
- Reduction of rework by 50%
- Laboratory Cost Reduction
- Reduction in Quality Holds by 1/2
- Right first time, TQM
- Work Life Simplification by thousands of hours
- Reduce Process Variation (Std Deviation) by 50%
- SOP standardization across different production facilities
