"Let's Get Technical" Short Video Series: Advanced SPC Monitoring with RunCard and DataCard

Watch this video to see how Intraratio's RunCard and DataCard streamline Statistical Process Control (SPC), with capabilities such as Western Electrical Rules and Z-Score monitoring, to provide you with actionable insights needed to optimize your manufacturing operations and deliver high-quality product.

In today's competitive manufacturing landscape, maintaining consistent product quality and minimizing process variations is paramount. Statistical Process Control (SPC) monitoring is essential to empower manufacturers to achieve these benefits.

SPC enables real-time monitoring to catch deviations early, reducing scrap and ensuring product consistency, while also facilitating data-driven process improvements. For example, Z-Score monitoring provides insight into process capability by showing how well production stays within tolerance limits, helping prevent defects by identifying outliers early.

While many companies today rely on easy-to-adapt solutions like spreadsheets to create statistical reports, this presents multiple challenges:

• Data Management Complexity: Large data volumes quickly overwhelm spreadsheets, making manual entry, version control, and data consistency challenging and error-prone.
  
  
• Limited SPC Functionality: Spreadsheets lack real-time monitoring, making trend detection difficult, if not impossible, and setting up control charts is labor-intensive, requiring error-prone manual formulas.
  
  
• Scalability Issues: Spreadsheets slow down with large datasets, making them impractical for managing extensive production runs or data across multiple locations.
  
  
• Visualization and Alerts: Basic visuals with no real-time alerts means potential issues go unnoticed.

These limitations lead many manufacturers to adopt dedicated SPC software for better data management, real-time updates, and advanced analytics.

The Benefits of Using Multiple SPC Techniques

When used in combination, Western Electric Rules and Z-Score monitoring delivers a comprehensive approach to quality management.   Identify deviations from target values, while simultaneously monitoring defectivity, provides a comprehensive assessment of your process capability.  By combining these tools, manufacturers achieve the following:

• Enhanced product quality: Ensure products consistently meet customer expectations.
• Improved efficiency: Reduce waste, rework, and downtime.
• Optimized processes: Identify areas for improvement and implement targeted interventions.
• Data-driven decisions: Use statistical analysis to guide operational changes.

Intraratio's RunCard and DataCard: Empowering Real-Time Quality Control

Intraratio's RunCard and DataCard form a powerful platform for real-time quality control. RunCard captures granular data at every manufacturing stage, from operator input to machine assembly and test results. DataCard's statistical engine then analyzes this data, generating instant SPC charts and reports. To ensure proactive quality management, users can configure RunCard to automatically flag processes violating Western Electric Rules and place non-conforming units on hold. Moreover, SPC charts generated in DataCard are seamlessly accessible within RunCard, enabling users to monitor and respond to process data in real-time from a single unified interface.

Z-Score monitoring dashboards provide factories with a visual tool for enhancing quality control and process efficiency. By displaying real-time Z-Scores and pass rates, factories can quickly identify out-of-spec steps and take immediate corrective actions. This dashboard data helps pinpoint areas with high variability across all jobs and factory lines, guiding targeted improvements to increase yield and reduce waste. Additionally, it supports data-driven decision-making by highlighting areas requiring maintenance or training, ultimately optimizing productivity. 

SPC alerts can be configured to notify users in-app, email, and/or SMS, of process deviations and automated product holds.  These notifications can be targeted by part number, work order, or even down to a serialized unit level, providing users with complete visibility and control over their processes at any level.  

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