Product Quality Monitoring

Hexatec software is used in a wide variety of applications including production line quality testing.

The following Case Study is an example of how Hexatec software can be used in this environment.

Case Study

PSI Global - Final Product Test System

Mixing Data from Engineering and IT

Systems for greater Process Control

David Hunter, son of the founders of PSI said, “We need to manufacture in a highly controlled environment in order to maintain our product quality.  Our customers rely on us to protect their products and systems from contamination.  To achieve this level of quality we need to test the entire product that goes through the factory.”  

PSI has an end test machine that fires an oil mist under pressure at the filter to ‘challenge it’.  They need to monitor what happens at the other end such as pressure drop and oil leakage and require sophisticated software to help them to do it. 

With this in mind, PSI approached Hexatec, an established provider of high quality advanced industrial software.  David Hunter adds, “We were already an existing customer of Hexatec’s and were pleased with both the product quality and the level of service they provided.  So when they told us about their latest software, SCAN1000, we were keen to try it.”

SCAN1000 is a PC-SCADA solution which links seamlessly with other core business software such as Back Office, providing a powerful management tool that will view and report on production processes effortlessly.  Designed to be simpler to use and quicker to configure than other products in the market, SCAN1000 saves time.   

Using SCAN1000, Hexatec designed a quality control computerised testing system for PSI that records the performance for each filter and decides on pass-fail criteria, collecting the relevant statistics on the quality of each batch.  This was important to PSI, as not only did they want to monitor existing product, but by providing in-depth production statistics on each batch they could continually improve upon their production process.

“We make each batch to order, David Hunter continues, “Our commercial systems will provide a batch number and product type that the SCAN1000 system reads.  There is a Quality Control Database containing expected performance characteristics for each filter type.  When the batch goes onto test, data is passed from the quality control database to the test machine.  As the test proceeds, the test machine will measure the performance of each filter, which is recorded into our quality control database.

“SCAN1000 is particularly useful for PSI as it combines commercial information with engineering test results to produce a truly integrated system.  This flexibility means we can search for quality statistics for any batch, provide information to our customers and readily access data for continuous product improvement.

What’s more, it’s not complicated.  It was easy to get SCAN1000 up and running and although we haven’t yet done a lot of data analysis on the data that has been recorded, we plan to in phase two.  In terms of an SPC (measurement) package, SCAN1000 is excellent.”