05 November 2012: Markus Pfirsching & Thomas Schäfer

The System Integration team (SI) usually works at the customer’s premises. Our main tasks are analysing systems, planning installations, configuring and installing the software, showing how to use the software and recognizing optimization potentials. This is the reason why we experience firsthand what Q-DAS means to our customers. A firm statement frequently issued by our long-standing customers is “We apply Q-DAS“.

Every company has its own past and each product has a specific background.

Whenever customers say they are using “Q-DAS“, they normally refer to qs-STAT. Without a doubt, this is our best known product and actually the best-selling Q-DAS software product. And since the software for statistical evaluation laid the foundation of the company and its success, this is quite a pleasant association. Still today, qs-STAT is part and parcel of our product portfolio and the heart of our company. However, “Q-DAS” is more than just qs-STAT by now.

During the last years, Q-DAS developed further software products with new functionalities. But why did Q-DAS do this when the original product was actually a success? There are two reasons.

1) More details about the measured value

Due to a multitude of analysis options, evaluation strategies, reports, etc., qs-STAT is able to evaluate processes, provide results that can be validated and identify room for improvement. However, the evaluation and thus the assessment of process qualification can only be as good and detailed as the data on which it is based. Even though measured values with tolerance limits are sufficient for statistical evaluations and calculations of capability indices, they do not give enough information to answer our customers’ real questions the Q-DAS System Integration team has to face every day.

• “Can you evaluate order ABC123 for our customer `company XYZ´?”
• “Why has the process variation been so high since yesterday?“
• “Are these 34 values really outliers?“ etc.

qs-STAT is indeed able to answer these questions, however, only if the required information is available in qs-STAT. This is the reason why Q-DAS offers software products such as procella and qs-STAT – they record measured values and store additional information like machine, order, etc...