I & R Partners continually seeks the most technologically advanced alliances in order to present innovative, state of the art solutions to our customers. The "early years" customers had experienced the frustration and the challenge of being responsible for either implementing or upgrading their shop floor data collection systems.

Japanese manufacturing quality culture has given us many useful concepts, including Kaizen, Kanban and Poka-yoke to name a few of the more well-known concepts. Another less familiar concept is Genchi Genbutsu, which loosely translates to “go to the actual spot and see for yourself.” In other words, instead of simply hearing or reading about a problem and then suggesting a solution, go to the site and form an opinion first-hand.

Maybe it is not too much of a stretch to think of this quality tool as encompassing the hot area of mobile data collection, in which process measurements are carried out in areas of the plant that auditors or inspectors could not otherwise access with their gages.

(Download PDF | Quality Magazine Link)

From pencil and paper, to black-box gauge interfaces, to portable and fixed-station statistical process control (SPC) data collectors, the technology for collecting data for quality control and manufacturing applications has continually evolved to make shop floor data collection more eficient, cost effective and reliable. An obvious benefit of this progression has been an increase in corporate profits, along with enthused shareholders.

With the advent of hand-held personal computers (PCs), many new possibilities for data collection have presented themselves. Wi-Fi-capable, hand-held mobile computers are popular because they eliminate the need for running network cables from one end of a facility to the other. Today’s hand-held mobile computers utilize technologies such as Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11 for their wireless capabilities. Such capabilities offer tremendous advantages for real-time data collection.

(Download PDF | Quality Digest Link) 

Cooper Surgical Inc. was founded in 1990 with a focus on women’s health care. It is a leading company in providing medical devices and procedural solutions that improve health care delivery to women.

In the medical device field, inaccurate data can be a matter of life or death. Any improvement in the efficiency and accuracy of data transfer during product development and testing helps medical device manufacturers ensure that their data, and thus their products, are the safest they can be while maintaining product throughput.

(Download PDF | Quality Digest Link)