Articles Tagged with ''data collection software''

When Donald Engineering sales manager Jim Kortman describes his aluminum extruder client of 28 years, he reaches for a deceptively simple analogy: the Play-Doh Fun Factory. 

When it comes to medical and pharmaceutical manufacturing, errors can be dangerous.

An SPC (Statistical Process Control) Software customer recently inquired if I could discern any issues in a process, as their customer had identified problems with three recent shipments. They provided data for the customer’s current year shipments for a variety of KPI (key process indicators) in an Excel file. 

When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole.” – Nikola Tesla (1926)

In the manufacturing world there are many different types of data collection. Some types involve production counts or machine up time, but this discussion is centered on data collection for establishing and monitoring product quality. 

For process manufacturing companies, it is a constant challenge to meet their customer’s product quality specifications, while operating as lean as possible. 

Most quality departments are still doing things the old fashioned way: measure, collect, compare, respond, fix, and repeat. This reactive, legacy approach is, of course, vital for any successful company, but in this data-driven age of smart manufacturing and Industry 4.0, it’s not enough. 

Forget Hamlet. What’s going on? That is the question.

Data collection is about addressing this most important question in strategy. Maybe “What’s going on?” is the greatest question ever asked. Right up there with “Where are we?” and “Who are you?”