SAS INSTITUTE INTRODUCES QUALITY CENTER METHODOLOGY
SAS Institute Inc., a market leader in integrated data warehousing and decision support, has discussed the methodology at the base of its Quality Center, at the AQC Conference in Anaheim, CA.
At the Quality Center press conference, Leo Wright, senior manager of quality systems at Gerber Products Company, led a discussion on enterprise quality improvement.
"A sincere commitment to total customer satisfaction requires that Gerber constantly work toward continuous improvement of quality processes," said Wright. "Gerber developed a new system for plant floor statistical process control and a strategy to provide management with statistical analyses and reporting capabilities. Gerber's quality control data warehouse provides 100% electronic data capture versus the previous level of 40%. To date we can attribute savings well in excess of $458,000 due to improved accuracy, precision, and control of product overfill."
According to Donna Fulenwider, business manager of the Quality Center, "The Quality Center at SAS Institute helps customers like Gerber Products achieve enterprise quality improvement by combining the Institute's expertise with its most advanced technology in the areas of statistical quality improvement, data warehousing, and data mining."
"The Center promotes an enterprise approach for improving the quality of products, processes and services," added Fulenwider. "This view rarely exists in organizations because key measurements are only collected at the process level and relevant information is typically found in different or incompatible systems, making confident enterprise-level decision making virtually impossible."
While statistical process control has become a way of life in manufacturing; today, products and process are much more complex, and companies have invested heavily in systems to measure process and quality variables. More data sources, more data, and more complex (multivariate) data create a flood of data. The issue is not simply process control at the plant floor level, but process management at the enterprise level.
As quality improvement requirements grow within an organization, fewer options are available to meet those requirements. In most cases, unique and custom solutions are needed. Often these "solutions" seem as insurmountable as the problems they should solve because they possess no "roadmap" for implementation. SAS Institute's goal with the Quality Center is to provide knowledge-based solutions for enterprise quality improvement. This involves strategies, software, and services. The Center has identified a hierarchy of three broad levels of opportunity, each with its own set of needs and architectures.
The first level, design of experiments and statistical process control, is where most customers reside, finding it difficult to cross the barrier to enterprise quality improvement. The second level integrates data from various sources into an enterprise quality improvement data warehouse. Once in place, production and quality data can be modeled and analyzed with manufacturing information from other systems such as Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. With enterprise information easily accessible, data mining methodology is poised to examine the vast amount of data, discovering patterns and associations that predict characteristics related to quality at each stage along the process.
The formation of the Quality Center satisfies the need for enterprise quality solutions, a comprehensive approach not addressed by "off-the-shelf" software. This approach to quality improvement is essential as processes and products have become increasingly complex, generating massive volumes of data from multiple data sources. The Center's framework moves a company along a continuum to total enterprise-wide quality improvement ranging from: statistical process control, transforming and analyzing data for process management, and employing data mining for process discovery. As a leader in analytical applications and information delivery for more than 23 years, SAS Institute is uniquely qualified to solve these enterprise quality improvement challenges. The Quality Center is the key to making the right decisions at all levels of the enterprise to improve the quality of products, processes and services.
To learn more about the SAS Institute Quality Center, see our Web site at: http://www.sas.com/qualitycenter.
About SAS Institute
SAS Institute, one of the top 10 independent software vendors, is the leader in decision support and data warehousing, providing integrated enterprise information-delivery solutions. The Institute markets packaged business solutions for vertical industry and departmental applications, as well as an integrated suite of software tools that allow companies to transform the wide variety of data within their organizations into information that business users and researchers need to make better decisions. SAS software and services are used at more than 33,000 business, government, and university sites in over 115 countries. Founded in 1976, SAS Institute is the world's largest privately held software company with 1998 annual revenue of $871 million.
Please visit SAS Institute's Web site: http://www.sas.com/.