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Providing a Quality Window on Manufacturing
Originally Published in the Cornwall Business Magazine
There is a Cornwall connection to many of the products you use everyday, courtesy of local software developer Busitech. The consistent quality and performance of leading products such as Tide, Pampers, Pringles and Hawaiian Punch have all been enhanced under the watchful eye of Quality Window, Busitech's flagship software program designed and distributed from their offices in the City's industrial park.
Quality Window is used on the factory floor in over 50 countries around the world to monitor processes and analyze events such as downtime. It helps companies learn more about their own operations so they can improve efficiencies. The program combines a simple to use interface with a powerful statistics engine to help the machine operator make immediate corrections as well as to provide trend information to senior managers so that they can make long-term decisions.
"It is a combination of Quality Window's simplicity and power, together with a dynamic and flexible structure, that has led to strong growth this past decade," says Peter Gault, President of Busitech. "The intuitive colours and symbols of the interface make it easy to use, whether you are in Canada, India or France. The charts and statistical reviews are very advanced, some even based on NASA's work, and will satisfy even the most sophisticated demands for information. Yet the program is entirely customizable to each operation, from a film manufacturer in Pennsylvania to a malt processor in the Ukraine or a perfume producer in France."
Quality Window was introduced in the late 1980's as a tool to help manufacturers collect data from their production lines, so that they could better understand what was happening and make improvements based on factual data. It was aimed at the operator level rather than management, giving shop floor workers the information and ability to monitor problems and graphically chart their progress. The subsequent adoption of the product as a standard by Procter and Gamble has been a cornerstone of the company's success as well as a source of ideas for product enhancements. For example, a need to gather data electronically led to the creation of new products, which uses dynamic data exchange protocols to gather information from programmable logic controllers and input the data automatically into Quality Window. Innovation never ends, however, and the latest version offers new charts and features and is Year 2000 ready.
"Over the years we have been fortunate enough to help lead companies toward solutions to certain problems", notes Mr. Gault. "Our goal is to keep Quality Window dynamic so that it can accommodate changes in manufacturing philosophy. With clients around the world, you can always count on someone developing a new way of doing things, and it is this atmosphere of change and growth that invigorates us."
Busitech is currently working on a new version of Quality Window that promises even more power and flexibility.
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