Spirax Sarco: Data, Quality 4.0 and the right people
An in-depth look into how the engineering organisation has embraced data and emerging technologies and leveraged them to deliver new capabilities within the company.
Businesses and organisations are continuing to evolve out of necessity, responding to an onslaught of disruption, new business models and technology. This continuous change, including that precipitated by the global coronavirus pandemic, is affecting business operations at all levels, with customers demanding real-time interactions, regulators applying increasing levels of scrutiny and governance and stakeholders requiring assurance in this complex and dynamic risk environment.
Spirax Sarco Engineering has embraced emerging technologies and leveraged them to deliver new capabilities within the company. The organisation is very data-driven and needs to be able to process and interpret data effectively and efficiently to facilitate discussions at all operating levels. One of the challenges faced by the company has been to improve the accuracy of the data to make sure the right decisions can be made to drive the future of the organisation.
Responding to the challenge has required different approaches to working closely with the manufacturing facilities and external supply chain. The challenge is to continually improve the quality of the data and then use it to drive product and process planning in order to predict and mitigate product design and manufacturing process errors during the new product development phase.
“In addition to traditional risk analysis methods such as DFMEA AND PFMEA, there will be greater opportunities for the customer application data to feed back to our organisation. Whether it is the new product introduction teams or the manufacturing teams, we will have greater knowledge of potential risks when we come to a new design or new manufacturing process. These potential risks will be much clearer to us… at the moment, the organisation receives this data through a number of manual feedback sources; in the future, there is a huge opportunity for these sources to be automated."
Phil Parker, Quality Manager Global Supply Chain
This case study was commissioned to take an in-depth look into how the engineering organisation has embraced data and emerging technologies and leveraged them to deliver new capabilities within the company. The CQI believe that ‘Quality 4.0’ (Q4.0) and the principles which underpin it will directly affect an organisation’s ability to deal with these huge changes in the digital era and, by extension, its ability to successfully uphold the established seven quality management principles. Before this can happen, however, Q4.0 needs to be properly understood, defined, and developed. Consequently, they have funded a research project into the Why, What and How of Q4.0, which has been carried out by the Oakland Institute and Leeds University Business School.
The how, or the implementation of Q4.0, has been examined through a series of interviews with practitioners, structured using the CQI Competency Framework elements, to determine which practices, technologies and tools are being used in their organisations. Part of that work has led to the development of a selection of illustrative ‘case studies,’ of which Spirax Sarco Engineering: Data, Quality 4.0 and the right people, is the third.
Read more about the programme of research commissioned by the CQI on Quality 4.0
