Novum (Overseas) Ltd. - Ireland

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 Windows^TM PC. Measuresoft developed a custom software application to control the tests.

Novum now has an automated test facility which:

• Runs independent tests concurrently in each of Novum’s three test rooms.
• Is simple and intuitive for its operators to use.
• Starts and stops tests automatically.
• Can be flexibly reconfigured to meet a changing product line or for special test requirements.
• Produces meaningful trend information and reports.
• Provides batch-by-batch archive of test results for tracability purposes.
• 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:

• Tests are very much easier to conduct, producing more reliable and repeatable testing at a fraction of the cost of alternative methods.
• 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.
• The easy to use interface has resulted in a very rapid acceptance and use by the operators.
• 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.