SPC - Statistical process control applied in LabVantage Express

Traditionally, QA/QC laboratories of manufacturing plants play a key role in maintaining profitability, increasing production throughput and staying ahead of competition. To achieve these goals, different kinds of statistical methods, such as SPC, are utilized. Today analytical testing laboratories meet the same challenges and cannot disregard statistical methods either.

Statistical process control (SPC) is a standard function in LabVantage Express. SPC is applied to monitor and control the quality of a manufacturing process, or to perform internal quality control of a measurement process of an analytical laboratory. The goal is to increase quality through statistical analysis.

Three different use cases

There are three different types of quality control use cases where SPC can be used in your laboratory.

• Instrument calibration: When monitoring calibration quality of an analytical instrument, you can use QC sample templates to represent a single batch of instrument reference material.
• Manufacturing process control: When monitoring test results of a manufacturing process, you can attach control cards to your samples by using context linking of the control card.
• Analytical quality control: When monitoring consistency of instrument results, you can use QC sample templates to create control samples according to the QC method when creating QC batches.

Statistical process control (SPC) can monitor your processes, evaluate your measurement process and track compliance to specifications. Control charts can be utilized to determine the stability and predictability of your process.

Utilizing limits

You can define your control card limits and targets either manually or let the system calculate them from previous results or from mean and standard deviation. Control card limits can provide early warning signals of abnormal process behavior and systematic errors in measurement or production processes, which are rarely detected without statistical methods. Data falling within the control limits will indicate that everything is operating as expected. In case data will fall outside the control limits, it can indicate that the process is out of control and something within the process should be changed to fix the issue before defects will occur.

How is Your laboratory controlling the quality?

Writer:

Vesa Rauhala, Sales Manager