In-process quality assurance
Intelligent product enhancement enables comprehensive interaction with the machine level
“Quality” is a comprehensive topic that industry has to deal with in all areas of the value chain. Especially in the production-related environment, the requirements of customers, partners and suppliers for comprehensive quality management are becoming increasingly stringent. Whereas in the past one had to rely on a loose coupling to a CAQ system, today one can go new, interactive ways with software-supported quality assurance.
The “in-process quality assurance” represents a new intelligent product extension of the MES solution cronetwork.
“We transfer all test specifications, test equipment and test plans from existing sources into our system and manage them. We use this information to serve almost all other cronetwork modules,” says Thomas Krainz, Member of the Board and responsible for strategic product management at Industrie Informatik, describing the new solution.
For him, the added value lies clearly in the fact that we have moved from a reactionary observation of qualitative manufacturing results in retrospect, to a proactive role that allows us to react to possible quality problems already during the production process. In short, manufacturing quality is no longer checked and evaluated afterwards, but is assured during the production process. Using integrated control charts, the recorded results are also statistically evaluated and visually prepared for the user.
The complete integration in cronetwork MES enables additional use scenarios, Krainz adds: “Full access to all our product functionalities allows us, among other things, to interact comprehensively with the automation and machine levels. For example, if test specifications at a plant are not complied with, for whatever reason, we can automatically initiate organizational measures and workflows, up to and including automatically stopping of the machine or system. Machine downtimes, high downtime costs, etc. can thus be counteracted at an early stage.”
Quality assurance during production with cronetwork: schematic representation
A clear demarcation of tasks is made in the direction of the CAQ system. While the data sovereignty, i.e. inspection plan management, is clearly located here, the service spectrum of cronetwork FQS includes the following core tasks:
- Monitoring of inspection intervals
- Recording of inspection values
- Data display and evaluation
- Evaluation and calculation of inspection values
Four good reasons für in-process quality assurance
Anita Peherstorfer
