Health Care Products Manufacturer Selects WinSPC Real-time SPC Software to Automate Statistical Process Control, Assure Quality, and Meet Regulatory Compliance Standards
The world’s largest eye heath company rolled out WinSPC to its plastic injection molding lines, where it produces a variety of molds for its eye health products. Each line produces multiple parts per run and hundreds of units per hour, per cavity, making it critical for the SPC solution to enable shop-floor personnel to quickly and efficiently respond to quality challenges.
Prior to implementing WinSPC, the company performed SPC manually using a labor-intensive “pen, paper, and personnel” process. After implementing WinSPC the company was able to capture, aggregate, and monitor quality by directly capturing and measuring data from other sources and devices, like Oracle, OGP text files, and serial devices. To ensure process conformance the team configured WinSPC’s Plant Monitor to monitor and display real-time quality control data for each mold, cavity, and variable. Now, if a reading falls outside of control limits the dashboard-like interface visually alerts the operator with a flashing light and sends a notification email. This allows one person to simultaneously monitor and assure process conformance from a single computer screen.
The company also uses WinSPC and its Custom Web Reporter (CWR) module to automatically produce Quality reports for management. Previously, the company compiled its management reports by hand, which took days. Custom Web Reporter enabled the company to automate that procedure and create professional-looking, web-based quality reports in minutes.
The quality team reports it chose WinSPC because:
- WinSPC was easily integrated with the existing IT infrastructure
- WinSPC was able to capture data from a variety of devices and databases
- WinSPC could quickly import tag, lot, user and other important quality data from other systems—making it fast and easy to implement
- WinSPC offered the best variety of charting options and layouts for quality personnel to visualize and monitor real-time activities
- Quality personnel could automate their management reporting tasks and produce professional quality reports in minutes
- Non-technical administrators and operators could learn WinSPC with a minimal amount of training
- WinSPC offered pre-built templates and toolkits so that the company could cost effectively perform an Installation Qualification and Operational Qualification in accordance with their regulatory requirements
DataNet’s Solution Delivery team traveled onsite to perform an initial project assessment, which helped guide the company in developing a deployment approach. To assist in implementation, the team returned to install WinSPC, train product administrators, and configured WinSPC to reflect current for use within their operations. Finally, the Solution Delivery team programmed an ODBC connection between WinSPC and the company’s other manufacturing systems to import existing quality data, such as product specifications, tags, lot information, and more.