The simple answer is Quality Window allows you to develop and implement solutions that are tailored to your specific needs and terminology in sometimes minutes but realistically hours or days. These solutions or applications are typically created and maintained by the actual departments or users that create them. This means no priority lists required for changes, you are in control and changes can be immediate.
Pretty big statements so lets dig a bit.
A Quality Window solution or Application is something you create to meet a specific task. Example: Track Downtime on line 6 or Monitor Quality variables for Customer A’s product. Think of an application like an Excel spreadsheet. You take a blank sheet and turn it into a tool. A Quality Window application is like that but better. Quality Window allows you to create an application with form and some rigidity to it, People will not wander all over the spreadsheet and make changes or add data where they shouldn’t. In addition, Quality Window then provides you with some very powerful but simple to understand tools to focus attention where it is needed most .. making good products every time!
The other great thing about Quality Window Applications is that they can be changed in seconds and not loose any of the existing data. You can add a column to start collecting data like pressures or speeds as soon as you realize you need them. No waiting in line – you just do it!
Because of its low cost and flexibility, Quality Window applications can act as prototypes for a larger much more costly solution. You can build and change applications until you are satisfied with what you want. At this point you can hand the solution off to developers if you so choose to create the rigid solution you want or need. I will warn you though, once you have had the ability to create and change so easily and in your complete control you will be hard pressed to give this ability up.
The intuitive ways that data is presented in Quality Window make the applications easy to understand – we like to call it “at a glance understanding”! The use of colors, symbols highlighting and grouped presentations of the data make it a powerful tool for quickly and accurately understanding data.
Let’s take a minute to discuss getting data in and out of Quality Window applications. No problem, you can collect it in Quality Window and export it to say Excel or Access. You can also take an existing Excel Spreadsheet, organized in rows and columns, and either import the data into Quality Window or create a Quality Window application from it on the fly. If your data is currently stored in MS Excel spreadsheets this may be a simple way to convert and create all that data to Quality Window. Through the use of special utilities like QWSQL Wizard you can unlock all that data in those SQL or Oracle databases and bring the data directly into Quality Window. This allows you to make use of all of the powerful tools in Quality Window for displaying and interpreting data and applying it to the data locked away in all those corporate databases. The tool even builds the application for you and you can save the data as a Quality Window application for further review or just throw it away after.
How about collecting data from devices like weight scales or automation systems like PLC’s? We have it covered! In the case of devices like weight scales there are utility programs included with Quality Window that allow for the direct collection of RS232 data from devices. This type of interface works great for applications like Product Fill Weights (an example is included with Quality Window in the Busitech/QW5/Sample Applications directory).
Quality Window can also collect data from DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) or OPC (Open Process Control) sources in either a manual mode through the Application’s Add screen or automatically using the QWScheduler Utility. Both these methods increase efficiencies and decrease errors. Using the Add screen method provides a great balance between the bridging of manual and automated data together – greatly increasing the value of both.