Company Profile
Novum is a Dublin based commercial refrigerator
manufacturing company - recognised world leaders in the manufacture of
deep freezers and have been leading the way in refrigeration technology
for over twenty years. Exporting to markets all over the world Novum
produce a range of refrigerator types.
Situation
Novum had been using hardwired chart
recorders to test their refrigerators through operating cycles prior to
dispatch to customers. In a bid towards quality driven manufacturing
practices this mechanism no longer provided the flexibility or the type
of information required by test engineers and by management, and it did
not provide the tracability of tests now being demanded by custom
Solution
Measuresoft, a Microsoft Certified Solution
Provider, proposed and installed a solution based on Measuresoft’s
ScadaPro
product running on single Microsoft WindowsTM PC. Measuresoft
developed a custom software application to control the tests.
Novum now has an automated test facility which:
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Runs independent tests concurrently in each of Novum’s three test rooms.
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Is simple and intuitive for its operators to use.
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Starts and stops tests automatically.
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Can be flexibly reconfigured to meet a
changing product line or for special test requirements.
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Produces meaningful trend information and reports.
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Provides batch-by-batch archive of test results for tracability purposes.
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Directly exports data into Excel so that
it can be manually filtered using a tool familiar to the user.
Benefits
In only three months the impact upon Novum’s business had been quite
dramatic:
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Tests are very much easier to conduct,
producing more reliable and repeatable testing at a fraction of the cost
of alternative methods.
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It has created a distinct competitive
advantage for Novum, as they are the only commercial refrigerator
manufacturer to offer such traceability and accountability in its testing
and QA.
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The easy to use interface has resulted
in a very rapid acceptance and use by the operators.
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The new types of information
available has allowed Novum to look at its business in a different way
and this information revolution has quickly permeated across the entire
organisation.
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