Certain standards of compliance are recognized globally, whereas others are local and manifest themselves depending on the geographical area or industry segment. One thing is certain though, as long as there are compliance standards, manufacturers need to meet them every day, in every transaction that takes place in their operation, especially on their shop-floors.
The biggest challenge when it comes to being compliant, is not just performing activities as per the standard, rather it is being able to record, store and report the effort put into being so, i.e. to record each transaction as it happens, store the data so it's safe and can be produced during audits and finally ensure the reports are generated in the prescribed compliance formats.
In our previous articles we have explored both the challenges which constitute making Quality everyone's business and its one probable solution, the MES. We have so far already established MES is the ideal vehicle to carry the QMS or Quality Management System, owing to its ability to integrate with other IT applications, record & report data in real-time, and being able to store flawless, consistent and most updated master data. Today, we will try and find out if MES is any good in dealing with the compliance challenge, what specific requirements of modern compliance MES fulfills and how compliance through MES can impact the organization's overall Quality management.
Compliance is still somewhat considered a necessary evil by many plant managers, and the reason they think so is because of the extensive and time consuming recording and reporting of data which is associated with it. Until recent past and even now, compliance recording is majorly a manual process carried out using pen and paper, where operators or supervisors enter data into a chart or sheet, periodically recording events and transactions as they happen on the production floor. This manual recording of compliance and quality related data presents two major problems:
1) the time consumed in recording and reporting is long and thereby a waste of productive time of work-force,
2) there is always a chance of errors when the data being recorded needs to be highly accurate, measured at a particular point of time and phase of the activity or process.
For more information about Compliance click here to read the complete blog post http://goo.gl/LtV8NY.