Technical Computing Magazine - Issue 37

Make real-time for quality?

Dave Woodward
Product Specialist

In the continuing quest to help manufacturing companies understand, analyse, and improve their processes, SPC software specialists Northwest Analytical (NWA) have just launched the Quality Analytics Server.

This brand-new tool provides SPC professionals with the power to monitor process performance throughout their organisation in real time.

Since NWA released the first version of Quality Analyst in 1985 it has rapidly become the SPC toolbox of choice for over 5000 companies worldwide. With implementations in almost every industry from agriculture to to zymotechnics (the art of brewing) Quality Analyst is ultimately responsible for the production of SPC reports for over 60,000 quality professionals on a daily basis.

The diverse spread of industries who have adopted Quality Analyst is a true testament to both the flexibility of the product and the universal cost and waste reduction benefits on offer from this dedicated SPC software.

We are therefore excited to announce a new product as part of the NorthWest Analytical SPC suite, Quality Analytics Server (QAS) which builds on the proven power of Quality Analyst to offer real-time SPC analysis and process monitoring.

“NWA Quality Analyst has improved our potential for a continual cycle of improvement and quality has already markedly improved...SPC using NWA Quality Analyst [is] very flexible and a great improvement over manual methods.”
Alex Phipps, Manager of Quality Monitoring, National Blood Service (Bristol Centre)

Quality Analytics Server is a realtime service that automatically updates “supervisory” status displays and SPC charts at predefined frequencies giving you an instant overview of your entire process using the latest information from your production database.

Using colour coded indicators, Quality Analytics Server will inform you of Specification, SPC Limit or Pattern Rule violations with the appropriate control charts being displayed at the click of a button.

This functionality is powerful enough in itself, however users can also acknowledge these process violations using centralised Assignable Cause and Corrective Actions which are stored with the Quality Analyst dataset for future reference. Charts which are created in the future will retain the causes and actions which have been assigned thus giving you a complete audit trail of problems and the applied solutions.

Another benefit of the QAS software is that variables from completely different databases can be displayed together on the same screen and updated together, or at completely different time intervals. You might, for example, wish to monitor temperature measurements every minute whilst pressure might be analysed every 20 minutes. For longer term trends you could configure the display to update every day at 9am.

In the event of a process violation taking place, every machine running the QAS client software will be updated at the next iteration of the server. By acknowledging the error and assigning a cause e.g. “measurement malfunction”, all of the other screens will be updated to show that the problem has been noted and a corrective action has been applied. You can even configure user privileges so that some staff have the ability to acknowledge process errors whilst others can only view the charts and violations.

Quality Analytics Server is easy to configure and can be deployed throughout your organisation without relying on costly external consultants or having to learn a new programming language. Existing users of Quality Analyst will be able to utilise their existing QA datasets and Run files to monitor key variables without having to rework hundreds of files.

Quality Analytics Server is a multithreaded and highly scalable solution which gives you the ability to quickly and easily monitor process performance throughout your organisation in real time. The feedback from our customers has been overwhelmingly positive with many requesting the software before it was officially released! If you can’t wait either, call our technical experts for more information or to register your interest.