Situation
Quality Manager for privately held injection molding company.
Critical issue
The Quality Manager wanted to free staff from data manipulation activities that were necessary, but that did not add value to the company.
Reason
The quality team inspected samples of complex products using a Coordinate Measuring Machine (CMM). Once a product was measured on the CMM, they manually entered data in a statistics package for analysis. The entry and review of data was a half-time job, conducted on each of two shifts at the company. This effort was also error prone.
Vision
Company leadership wanted to redirect people from non-value-added data manipulation to more productive activities. By automating the data collection process, the Quality Manager expected to reduce or eliminate measurement error, and free up his staff for more productive work.
Hertzler Systems provided
We set up a process to automatically extract and analyze critical inspection data directly from the CMM. GainSeeker automatically evaluates new data for stability, and notifies key people of any out-of-control situations.
Results
The initial experience proved that the time required to collect and analyze data has shrunk from four hours per shift to less than 45 minutes, an 81% reduction. The Quality Manager believes this will collapse even more as the users get more familiar with the process.
This reduction is the equivalent of the elimination of two half-time positions. According to the Quality Manager, the company has retained the staff and reassigned them to more productive activities.
Automating data acquisition has also eliminated the typographical errors that were common in the manual process, thereby increasing the reliability of the data. Users are more confident in making decisions and taking actions based on data .
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