September 29, 1010
Latest SPC Software Tools Arm Quality Professionals With New Technologies To Uncover Hidden Manufacturing Costs, Identify High-Value Improvement Initiatives, And Expose Quality Issues Early In The Manufacturing Process
SOUTHFIELD, Mich., Sept. 29, 2010–DataNet Quality Systems (DataNet), developers of WinSPC® and QualTrend® quality control software, announced it has released a new version of its real-time quality control software, WinSPC. The all-new WinSPC Version 8.0 boasts a faster, more effective way for quality professionals to glean real-time SPC answers from their manufacturing processes.
“DataNet’s goal is to enhance our customers’ ability to deliver the highest quality product for the lowest possible cost,” said DataNet CEO Stephen A. Arnett. “WinSPC Version 8.0 gives them this ability. It provides the mechanism for quality teams to transform the way in which they identify, manage and prioritize their continuous improvement initiatives.”
One of the highest priorities for manufacturers is the ability to quickly identify critical process issues and high-value process improvement opportunities. DataNet has always understood this priority and addresses it in WinSPC Version 8.0 with the introduction of two new technologies: the Cost Inspector™ and a database-wide SPC answer engine. Together these technologies empower managers to view their SPC programs at a strategic level and prioritize their improvement initiatives based on the dollar value they can bring to the company’s bottom line.
The Cost Inspector
The Cost Inspector enables quality professionals to calculate the cost of give-away, visualize optimal process settings, and identify cost-saving opportunities. Using the Cost Inspector, quality professionals can:
- Uncover and minimize loss from processes that have significant give-way or scrap
- Track and calculate the cost of process deficiencies in terms executives understand—dollars saved
- Visualize optimal target settings
- Calculate dollars by reducing variation and/or shifting processes to optimal
- Evaluate the cost vs. benefit of improvement
- Prioritize improvements based on highest potential for savings
- Produce executive-level cost reports
- Win executive-level support based upon demonstrated cost / benefit analysis
“To maintain executive-level support for continuous improvement programs, quality teams must be able to showcase the impact that process variation reduction programs make to the company’s bottom line,“ said Arnett. “The Cost Inspector ties cost to manufacturing process statistics, quickly enabling the organization to identify the variation reduction efforts that provide the highest value. Low value programs fall to the wayside, while high potential cost-reduction programs can be quickly identified and funded.”
The SPC Answer Engine
“Quality managers sometimes compare uncovering quality issues to ‘searching for a needle in a haystack’,” said Arnett. “There is no simple way to identify improvement opportunities.”
To address this, DataNet introduced a powerful “SPC answers” engine, which allows teams to broadly scan their manufacturing processes for performance issues, answer quality questions, detect trends and expose problem areas. Unlike the traditional microscopic nature of SPC, which focuses on isolated areas of your process, WinSPC’s query engine provides a higher level, more strategic way to view shop-floor data.
“The answer engine reduces the time it takes for quality teams to identify, quantify, and prioritize improvement efforts,” said Arnett. “Our customers report that they spend a majority of time fire-fighting various process issues as they surface.”
Using English language based queries, quality engineers can proactively answer strategic questions like:
- What process have changed today? This week? This month?
- Are we watching the right things?
- What is not raising alarms, but should be?
- What changes have gone unnoticed?
- What requires my immediate attention?
- Is my process as efficient as it can be?
“These new technologies expand the traditional view of SPC, real-time SPC and real-time quality control,” said Arnett. “We will continue to deliver technologies that put process information into the hands of manufacturing personnel–enabling them to make faster, better decisions that directly affect quality and profitability.”
WinSPC Version 8.0 offers several other enhancements, including:
- The Variable Analyzer: Get a complete profile of your data with a single click, analyze data, reveal problems, and explore “what-if” scenarios using the all-new variable analyzer. This new feature makes it easier then ever to drill down and experiment on a variable-by-variable basis.
- Graphical Report Builder: Use our new report builder to quickly create, publish and share quality reports from within WinSPC. WinSPC version 8.0 offers all the same reports available in WinSPC version 7, plus dozens of new reports and templates to make quality reporting simpler than ever before.
- Faster product administration: Save time managing WinSPC using the new global administrative tools and other drag, drop, link, and right-click enhancements. WinSPC, known for its ease-of-use and maintainability, offers several new enhancements that allow quality personnel to spend less time and effort setting up and managing software and more time on reducing process variation.
- Better, faster data capture: Use our new communication devices and enhanced data capture components to easily collect, capture, and share data with other systems, equipment and data repositories. WinSPC continues to strengthen its shop-floor data collection capabilities by expanding its ability to communicate with common tools and software, like Microsoft Excel and other data file formats.
Pricing and Availability
WinSPC Version 8.0 is now shipping. WinSPC licenses are sold on a concurrent seat basis. Each base license includes full functionality such as administration, data collection, monitoring, plant monitor, alarming, analysis, event log, and reporting. All DataNet customers under current service coverage will automatically receive a free upgrade notification and upgrade instructions from DataNet’s technical support department.