A Walkthrough of Hubfly Foundry QA App | Hubfly

If you have happened to visit a foundry, you might be aware that they make raw castings in accordance with the relevant metal/material specifications. After the initial visual inspections, machining will be carried out in standard accredited machine shops that are ISO certified like ISO 9001:2008.

There would be a Quality Assurance department that is responsible for every minute quality checks until sign-off prior to dispatching the finished material.

Foundry QA process

Quality Assurance process is something where one might need to capture Grades, Chemical Composition ranges, the various tests a metal might undergo like Tensile, Elongation, Hardness tests etc.

Not only that, QA person is supposed to capture how many times a mold is poured, ideal waiting time between various tests, and also have a look of total upcoming, overdue and completed tests.

Pain points of a Manual Foundry QA process

How hectic is that to manually perform all these? Not to mention the person handling this would be hot under the collar. Adding to the pain most foundries are supposed to maintain enormous log books for 20 years to support with any internal or external audits.

Just imagine the time and effort that will be wasted in just searching for a test in the pile of these books? And the cost to maintain those records for 20 years! Sure, it is mind boggling.

Introducing Hubfly Foundry QA App

We at Hubfly have built a wholesome Foundry QA App (coupled with a mobile app) with inputs from some of the leading foundries in Coimbatore.

We are happy that it is running live in some of the top names in Coimbatore including JS Autocast, SAAPL to name a few. Let us discuss the benefits of Hubfly Foundry QA app and then have a close look into the features step by step.

Foundry QA App is set to eliminate all the pain points we discussed a while ago. Firstly, you eliminate all pain in maintaining those huge log books.

Any test, quality check can be retrieved at the click of your mouse instantly. You have all the data stored in cloud, which means you have remote access.

You can remotely watch the entire QA process of your foundry at your comfort. Further, the app is completely permission based which means the end QA person will have access to only the test configuration and log screens, and not the Management or QAC Admin screens.

Okay, now let us dive straight into our app and you will judge for yourself what kind of a transformation it could make for the Quality Assurance process in a Foundry.

Hubfly Foundry QA App Dashboard

“N.B. The screenshots we share here are from our staging environment and hence the UI is not updated. The final app is set to have a gorgeous UI.”

This is how the Foundry QA screen looks like. The left pane has a placeholder for the company logo and a Navigation bar — navbar — that holds the main menus of the App.

#1. Add Customer Details

The first thing to do after deploying the app is to configure the Customer Section. Only then the customer field will pull values in the rest of the screens. This form is self-explanatory, you just have to fill in customer’s name, address, contact details etc.

#2. Configuration Section

The Configuration screen will have four tabs as shown here. It helps configure Grade, Parts etc. The first 2 tabs are related to Foundry Lab and the last two will make sense while we discuss CTQ/QAP section.

All these configuration settings may vary from foundry to foundry and you are free to add / delete custom values of your choice.

Below is a snapshot of the Parts Configuration tab which has options to configure all the chemical composition ranges. If you notice you will see there are two set of fields, one to capture the customer given composition ranges and the other one to internally followed chemical composition ranges.

Most foundries will have a slight deviation without compromising on the quality standards and it is necessary to configure both the settings here.

If you come down, you have options to configure the applicable tests. Selecting the check boxes against the specified tests opens up the configuration settings for the individual tests.

The due hours, grace hours can be configured here. Each test might have a specific rest time before the next test can be done. Those are configured in the grace time field.

#3. Test Registry

Test Registry is the section where the worker will have access to. The quality assurance person who does the tests and quality checks will have to log in the values here in this section. It has four tabs to capture the test values.

Did you notice that the Chemical Entry tab section has only one Chemical Composition Ranges? Yes, because we would need to ensure that the quality assurance person enters the real test values rather than copying or manipulating the values by having a look at the INTERNAL or CUSTOMER chemical composition ranges that are configured in the Parts Config screen earlier.

The other 3 tabs in the Test Registry screen captures values of different tests with a neat chart view and a table view of the Upcoming, Overdue and Grace Period tests.

This screen comes in handy for the QA person to know where to focus next. Instead of checking the log books for the next tests to perform, this screen shows everything neatly categorized with graphical charts.

How easy is that for a QA person? The person would declutter his mind off and be clear of his/her work schedule.

This is the Activity Master tab where you can configure all your Foundry activities and their optimal values. The next screen shows the CTQ/QAP Job Master where you configure the applicable jobs.

These are one time configuration and they appear in Quality Assurance Details screen in the Mobile App and other relevant places for the Inspection person to log the values.

This also comes with a Mobile App, compatible with Tab where the QA person can enter the quality assurance details. QAC visual inspection might require taking snaps of the materials in the foundry assembly.

The app will allow only camera access and not Gallery access so that the QA person doesn’t upload snaps already taken via the Gallery. The resource is supposed to take a snap via the Camera at the time of inspection.

The Mobile app also has a Search screen where quality assurance jobs can be searched by Job Code. The mobile app comes in handy for the QA person to log the inspection findings and take snaps on the go.

#4. Search Functionality

Next, let us discuss about the Search feature. You already felt the pain of digging the pile of log books in the beginning of this article. This is where you get relaxed with our advanced filters able to get you the tests you need instantly.

This section has two tabs, Search Parts (Foundry Lab) and Search QAC jobs (CTQ that are measurable & QAP that visual inspections) separately.

You could search by Customer Name, Job Code, Heat Number, Date, Test Status etc. You can give one or more criteria to filter the ones you need. It’s as simple as that. You even have an option to export the test results to Excel.

#5. Management Screen

This Management screen has everything the management team would like to monitor. The Management Dashboard has two tabs, Foundry QA, CTQ/QAP which shows the status of QA tests for a given date period. Overdue tests, Upcoming tests & Out of Spec tests are listed part-wise.

The second tab shows Overdue & Out of Spec jobs that can be filtered date wise. The management at any point in time can have an overview of the entire Foundry QA processes to check for any alarming notices.

#5. QAC Admin Screen

The Management screen we saw in the previous section gives a top-level overview of the QA process. This might suffice the management.

But, however QAC Admins (the supervisors) might need to dig further for more analytics, reports. Here comes the QAC Admin screen where one could view even more detailed reporting in tabular view, chart view etc. You could even have a look at the Department Wise Activity, Department Wise Deviation which makes the job of QAC Admin easy to supervise their staffs and instruct them accordingly.

#5. Reports

Finally, comes the Reports section where you could extract the MTC report (Material Test Certificate) as a pdf attachment. Just input the customer name and other details as shown in the below screen and click Generate MTC Report button and voila, you get a PDF report handy.

Why you need Hubfly Foundry QA App

Hubfly Foundry QA App has already revolutionized some of the top foundries in Coimbatore. This App if implemented could …

• Easily save you up to 200,000 INR every month on your budget, in addition to the time and effort that is required to handle the QA processes manually.
• Furthermore, since this is totally automated solution, the accuracy would be 100%.
• Adding to those, think about the insights the app gives. At the click of a button, you could extract any test that is conducted months ago to help with any of your Audit compliances.
• At any point in time, you could monitor the status live. Overall status of Ongoing, Overdue and completed tests makes work prioritizing easy.
• All your data stays on cloud. Not only your data will be secure, you don’t have the headache of taking local backups to restore during a mishap.
• The app is totally permission driven, you only have access to the screens to which you are authorized to.
• All future updates to the app will be delivered automatically by us. You never have to handle any software updates manually.

We are bringing in more features to the app with valid inputs from the clients who use our app real-time. Watch out for a next major update of the app, with added features, improvised UI which will set new standards on how a QA process should be done in foundries.

View Original Post Here : http://blog.hubfly.com/business-apps/a-walkthrough-of-hubfly-foundry-qa-app