The Gartner Manufacturing Maturity Model is helpful if you and your boss are asking questions like these: What are we trying to achieve? What shapes the direction we’re heading? Are we just executing random projects, or is there a long-range trajectory? And of course, what is the role of real-time data in achieving that strategy? This post reviews recent GainSeeker Case Studies and maps them to stages on the journey to Manufacturing Maturity.
A few versions back we added an enhancement to GainSeeker SPC Software called Chart Skins. As a trainer, I made sure to demonstrate this feature to the GainSeeker users I trained. It has come to my attention I should probably "arm-wave" this topic a bit more so everyone knows what it is and that it IS available! A Chart Skin is a collection of saved setting preferences. It remembers everything about chart settings including background colors, logos, line colors, number of data points to date ranges. It truly is anything and everything from the settings tab in the GainSeeker Charts Module.
This May we launched our new Client Advisory Board. We hosted our inaugural meeting in Chicago on May 16. Eight clients from across the United States flew or drove in for the day-long meeting. Most of them came the night before to tour one of the CAB member’s manufacturing plants. Our company prides itself on being customer focused. And we do a pretty good job. But often our conversations are tactical; down-in-the-weeds. We talk to customers. They tell us what problem they’re trying to solve. We roll up our sleeves and get the job done. We wanted to step back and ask bigger questions.
A request for a Tech Tip on Dynamic Reports came in last week. For those of you who are not familiar with Dynamic Reports, it is a 3rd party reporting tool. Many of our customers desire the ability to print a Certificate of Authenticity (COA) for their customers out of GainSeeker. For this reason, we packaged Dynamic Reports into our software. It allows for customized reports not available in our charting module. When you require full control of the desired output this tool becomes handy. I will try my best to give you some best practices in this article.
Last year we released our most comprehensive Real-Time SPC Software Buyer’s Guide. The guide had grown from a simple list of cool GainSeeker Suite features into a powerful tool for comparing GainSeeker to other options. This year we took this idea one step further. We decided to call out areas/features that we do not do, or where a particular feature isn’t as strong as we’d like it to be. On the one hand, this seems crazy: what company ever points out anything that might be seen as a weakness? On the other hand, full disclosure and transparency should help you make a better choice. We hope your choice for real-time SPC software will be GainSeeker Suite. But ultimately we want you to make the best choice possible for your company.
About four Tech Tips ago I wrote about one of the cool factors of GainSeeker 8.7: a new feature that sends you an alert if an inspection is overdue. This is such a cool new feature that I couldn't wait to share it, and it might be enough to get you to download the new release. I now feel I cannot let all the other new features hide in the darkness. While I cannot mention all the awesomeness in the new version, I can point out some major wow factors and also direct you to the link that explains all the new awesomeness in GainSeeker 8.7.
So what do fire hydrants and Real Time SPC Software have in common? Recently I sat down with a client to talk about how deploying GainSeeker Real Time SPC Software has benefited his company. Joseph Benford (everyone calls him "Buddy") is the Corporate Quality Manager for Mueller Co. Mueller is a 160 year-old manufacturing company that started in central Illinois. They manufacture water distribution products, including fire hydrants and a variety of valves and gates, with a number of facilities across North America.
The SPC Variation Wizard and the DMS Drill-down Wizard take time and guesswork out of your day as it helps you find the sources (root causes) of variation in your processes. The Big Data Widget (yes, there is one for both SPC and DMS.) is your Variation Wizard / Drill-down Wizard on steroids. This control analyzes all your Standards having data during a given time period. Not just one Standard at a time, but all of them!!
A recent example of an increased drive for standardized SPC software across the supply chain comes from Consolidated Container Company’s (CCC) deployment of GainSeeker Suite. Up until recently, GainSeeker Suite was one of several SPC software solutions in use across CCC’s 59 plants in North America. Some months back, the company decided to standardize on a single quality system. After an exhaustive process, they selected GainSeeker Suite as their standard platform for quality data. Find out how it's going.
Consolidated Container Company (CCC) is one of the largest suppliers of rigid plastic packaging in North America. Many of their facilities were using outdated legacy information systems, and the company had no formal standardized quality data system. According to Vicki Slavik, Corporate Quality Director, the company was “an internally focused company, and quality was a pain point for our customers.” Matt Simpson, Corporate Quality Systems Manager, was tasked with recommending a single system to deploy across the company. The new system would provide plant-floor personnel with up-to-the-minute information about their asset’s performance. At the same time, the data would be rolled up across production lines and manufacturing facilities so that leadership at the local and corporate levels could easily see what was happening.
