When I am fortunate enough to go train our customers, one of the important "side notes" I mention is the fact that we rely on enhancement requests from YOU to help continue to growth of our software product. Throughout the years, customers asked about the ability to create their own custom statistic. If you are on a supported version of GainSeeker® (click here to find out) then you possess the ability to create your very own custom statistic!!!! The Custom Statistics Editor gives you the ability to create, edit, and use SPC or DMS statistics inside GainSeeker. These are created using Python scripts.

Recently I had a conversation with a client about his experience using another SPC software system. “It was so frustrating,” he said. “To really get to the data I needed, I had to extract it from several files into a big spreadsheet. It literally took two days to find the data, export it, and then combine it into a format that I could use. It was a huge drain of my time.” Anytime my client needed to drill into a problem, he was staring into a one or two-day data extraction and scrubbing project. With all the other pressures bearing down on him, he didn’t have two-day blocks he could readily give up. It wasn’t that he was lazy, afraid of hard work, or incapable or incompetent. He is highly competent and very bright. And that was the root of his frustration. He knew what to do, but he just had too much on his plate to be able to execute effectively.

A Performance Chart helps define process capability by grouping data by a traceability value in a Box and Whisker format. This allows for quick visual comparison of data groups by mean and variation. Why don't you follow along with me and lets produce this chart together. In fact, I will show you two ways to produce this chart grouped by Traceability.

In the next few weeks we’ll release GainSeeker Version 8.8. The most important new feature? Real-time dashboards that connect to any data source. Manufacturing leaders are often hobbled by antiquated and disparate data systems. These folks are working under tremendous pressure to get results, but they struggle to meet their goals. It isn’t because they’re not working hard; they are. And it isn’t because they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re bright, hard-working and competent. And it isn’t that they lack data. They have lots of data. In fact, they’re drowning in data. But that data is not visible, it’s not timely, it lacks context, or it’s in a form that is pretty much useless. Connecting real-time dashboards to any data source breaks down barriers to data so that information is timely, visible, and actionable. If you have data hidden in your order entry, scheduling system, or factory information system, you can bring it to the light of day on a GainSeeker Dashboard.

GainSeeker Tech Tips is going LIVE!! Let me briefly tell you the low down on this fantastic event. We will start having a Tech Tips LIVE Webinar once a quarter. We will set the topic before hand and email / blog out the information to you. Our first event will be held October 19 at 2 p.m. Eastern (11 a.m. Pacific). Byron Shetler, our amazing Chief Technology Officer and "Alpha Geek", will demonstrate our new release, GainSeeker v8.8,

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.