A useful new home screen widget called Part Frequency has been added to QC-Mobile 4.2. This new widget provides transparency into the data collection frequency on the shop floor through the browser interface that is QC-Mobile.

A major goal of QC-Mobile has been to provide visibility to all quality processes across the factory. There are three important facets to providing this visibility; part quality, deliverable verification, and data collection verification.

• Part Quality - This is the most obvious of the facets and involves tracking metrics such as Cpk through both data display, live displays, and data visualization through reports, dashboards, and full views.
• Deliverable Verification - Just as important as part quality is the ability to verify that deliverables are continuing to run. It is great to have a full view showing all green lights, but if it has not refreshed in two weeks, then the visualization is stale and may need to be checked, restarted, cleared of exceptions, etc.
• Data Collection Verification - Data collection verification gives end users visibility that data is actually continuing to be collected. Again, part quality metrics and deliverables hinge on the fact that data collection continues to occur on a regular basis so the statistics and metrics are timely. Without this, running a daily report is not giving new information to the users that need to make important decisions about how to proceed.

Data Collection Verification

This new widget addresses data collection verification. It is set up as a card on the home screen and can view data collection by workstation, part file, or trace field with a lookback number of days between 1 and 28. In all cases, the days are shown in the widget as colored rectangles or tick marks. Gray ticks are days declared as non-business days (such as weekends). Green ticks are days where the expected amount of data collection was met. Users can optionally specify warning and exception amounts below which the ticks will be shown as orange or red depending on daily part counts.

Clicking individual tick marks displays a popup with the date, total parts collected and a column chart distribution by hour showing parts collected per hour. Other dates can be selected to quickly flip between dates and the part files involved are provided with links to live data.

Setting up the Part Frequency Widget

When setting up the widget, settings are specified for the type, lookback days, and valid weekdays. All other settings depend on the type of frequency chosen. Whether choosing Workstation or Part File, multiple can be chosen from special popups and Warning and Exception levels can optionally be added. If not added, all ticks will be green regardless as to the number.


Trace Field Frequency

This option allows users to track frequency by a specific trace field in the database. Since this could result in a broad amount of part files, there is an extra filtering level allowing the user to specify only trace fields from a particular location or a specific part file. Once the trace field to monitor has been chosen, the various values become the items that can be chosen for monitoring. As an example, if one of the trace fields being tracked is the machine on which the part was manufactured, data collection can be tracked at this level.