British Gypsum is using Quality Monitor Software from Northwest Analytical, supplied by Adept Scientific, to implement consistent quality processes and improved productivity in plants throughout the UK.
Plasterboard manufacturer British Gypsum is the UK’s largest plaster, plasterboard and related products manufacturer. The company has been making plasterboard for more than a century and today produces more than 150 million square metres every year in five plants across the UK and consistent quality is of critical importance to British Gypsum.
Until recently, the five different British Gypsum board-producing plants, used paper-based recording systems of different types, while one had built its own in-house database system.
According to Amanda Nurcombe, company quality systems manager at British Gypsum, a desire by the company to introduce a standard process across all its plants led to a search for a better solution.
After evaluating various products, British Gypsum selected Northwest Analytical’s (NWA) Quality Monitor package, supplied by Adept Scientific. NWA Quality Monitor is a powerful, dedicated solution for shop floor data collection and statistical process control. The package allows standardised workflow processes to be built to match the needs of a specific production line, stores data from multiple workstations in a central database and provides live charting and analysis of quality data.
‘Even during the pilot phase, I’ve been able to analyse data at my desk,’ according to Nurcombe. ‘When we complete the roll-out to all the plants we will also be able to compare their performance on different products and share best practices between plants.’
For Nurcombe having a single, standard system in place will help greatly with control and flexibility, as she said: ‘With Quality Monitor I know that, as our requirements change in the future, the system is flexible enough for us to incorporate those changes directly into the database.’
NWA Quality Monitor and NWA Quality Analyst are supplied and supported in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Scandinavia and Nordic countries by Adept Scientific.
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