Beyond SPC: Enhanced Process Monitoring with Geometric Process Control (GPC)

Statistical Process Control (SPC) has been a foundation of improved quality management over the past decades and has been very successful, especially in manufacturing industries. SPC applies univariate statistics separately to process variables and quality achievement but neglects multivariate interaction. An example is a process with over 25 quality parameters tracked individually with SPC Charts. Imagine the reaction when a few minutes’ work with GPC showed none of the product simultaneously achieved all quality constraints.  SPC is not as common in the process industries where most quality results are related to many process variables.

The answer to this need in industries with complex multi-variable relationships comes from a different branch of mathematics. Geometric Process Control (GPC) is based on multi-dimensional geometry. GPC solves the challenges of relating all process variables, including correlations between product qualities as well as capturing the effects of process variables. GPC gives engineers self-service analytics that requires good process knowledge but only basic mathematics. Applications range from discovering cause-and-effect relationships to process monitoring, identifying operations targets, process improvement and more.

GPC can also be used in real-time applications for advisory process control and early detection of equipment issues. GPC is visual due to its foundation in geometry, making it easily understood with a brief explanation by anyone in an organization.

In our webinar, we will demonstrate how the analytics tool is used to find better operating targets and continue to the modeller tool to generate a real-time machine-learning geometric model where derived variable relationships are intriguingly represented in the shape of the geometric object rather than in equations. The modeller includes an Operator Display and OPC Client and can handle multi-mode and multi-phase models (batch processes, multiple grades, etc.).