Quality Workbench

 
 
Quality Pays Dividends

Solution

VISIBILITY Quality Workbench®

Solution Benefits

  • Quality Workbench provides all of the following immediately accessible benefits:

  • Real-time workflow & event driven corrective action reporting and action system

  • Integrated tool usage history traceability and management

  • On-line real time access to all revision controlled manufacturing process and quality assurance system documentation

  • Employee skills management for training and assured matching of employee skills to job requirements

  • Comprehensive product quality attribute data collection, reporting and management from incoming inspection through to final work in process receipt

Customer Background

This Visibility client provides contract engineering and manufacturing services related to the production of electrical components and assemblies with multiple domestic and off-shore locations. They have had a consistent track record of growth by concentrating and effectively competing on quality, timeliness and price. They require a state of the art process and quality control system that provides both the flexibility and consistency to deliver the highest quality manufacturing services and cost effective product delivery.

Key Challenges

  • Rapid expansion and addition of new facilities

  • Increasing variety of manufactured products

  • Requirement to achieve and sustain for full ISO 9000 quality system certification

  • Need to reconcile disparate paper and electronic systems and tools used to plan, measure and manage quality control

  • Need to reduce costs and maintain or improve product quality

Detailed Challenges

This client had a strong reputation for providing quality manufacturing services that were driving expansion of products and facilities to meet an increasing demand. While the organization was strongly committed to quality management and was actively seeking ISO certification, the systems that were being used to plan, document and measure the effectiveness of business, engineering and manufacturing processes were not fully integrated with the enterprise business applications. The management of quality processes, documentation and data was labor intensive, often involving stand-alone tools. The company’s expansion of product and service offerings, and manufacturing locations, was making quality increasingly more costly and difficult to manage.

  • The client’s goals were to:

  • Integrate quality systems with the company’s core business applications

  • Document best practices and share these automatically across multiple jobs

  • Collect meaningful data in real-time to monitor performance versus objectives

  • Reduce the costs incurred to achieve quality objectives across the organization

  • Achieve ISO certification.

This customer understood that quality pays dividends and wanted an integrated approach to managing quality that tied directly into the VISIBILITY system.

Solution Details

By defining a Client specific solution with well defined integration into the core VISIBILITY ERP application, the Client met or exceeded the requirements of each challenge, while assuring that the solution would be long-lived without bearing the burden which can accompany stand-alone custom solutions.

Working closely with Visibility, the client fully implemented Quality Workbench across the entire organization as the core of its quality control and management system.

Single point process documentation implementation and maintenance - Quality Workbench provides the tools to define and capture best practices for individual processes that are used across many shop floor control routings and business processes. By storing this information once and associating these best practices with many routings and functions, the client was able to insure that the current best practices were available, being employed, and could easily be updated and maintained. This dramatically improved repeatability and consistency of common practices in often, very different contract projects.

Incoming inspection quality attribute definition and data collection - Quality Workbench enhances incoming inspection capabilities by allowing users to define part number, supplier and warehouse specific attributes for data collection at the point of incoming inspection. Parts subject to incoming inspection with defined quality attributes must have all attribute data collected before final receipt is allowed. This enabled active monitoring of part and supplier performance and the information necessary for immediate corrective actions.

Tool definition, maintenance, calibration and quality standards - Tool calibration and maintenance facilities were utilized within Quality Workbench to control and maintain tool use. The links that were established between the bill of material components, engineering routing operations and tooling allowed tool use to be controlled and tracked to assure that only “in-calibration” tooling and equipment were employed in an operation.

ISO Certification Audit support - The document management features of Quality Workbench and integrated data collection capabilities were invaluable in both managing the details of quality throughout the organization, as well as demonstrating these practices for certification. The client was able to pass a full ISO Audit at three different locations in a single day.

Lowered cost of quality implementation and production - The links from Quality Workbench touched every aspect of the VISIBILITY system and the client’s business processes. The full implementation provided the functionality required to design, implement and cost effectively maintain a high-performance quality system. The system not only provided the proven benefits of an effective quality management system by helping to lower production costs and improve quality, but also significantly lowered the cost of managing quality across the organization.

 
 

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