Why AlisQI was the only choice for Lamers High Tech Systems

The initiative to automate Quality Management processes has to be seen in the light of this industrial and R&D strategy.

High-end customers such as ASML were demanding detailed statistical reporting for every part coming from the highly complex manufacturing processes, often carried out in the demanding environment of the 2,600m² clean-room at the Lamers plant.

It was ASML that alerted Lamers to the integrated AlisQI Quality Management System. That was recommendation enough, and after a brief pilot, Lamers greenlighted to implementation of the AlisQI solution. In 2017, it hired Geert Segers as QHSE Manager.

Throughout his 15 years in Quality Management, Segers has worked with many different systems. How does AlisQI compare?

Segers is keen to highlight the integration between product and process quality. “You can link processes directly to product output,” he says, “that is where AlisQI scores, because in other systems, the two are not linked at all.”

In keeping with its no-code business model, AlisQI invited Lamers to see how another one of its customers had implemented the platform.

This gave Lamers a lot of practical ideas on how he could successfully embed AlisQI in its own Quality infrastructure, and greatly speeded up decision-making. “And so the idea was born to implement AlisQI internally,” says Segers.

The AlisQI platform integrates every aspect of Quality Management: Quality Control & LIMS, Document Management, and certification and inspection for Quality, Health, Safety & Environment (QHSE).

At Lamers, Document Management consisted of a ‘paper’ manual and a folder structure on a server. An intranet page provided access to the manual, which was in fact no more an archive. “Versions and changes were managed and updated manually,” Segers explains. “Nothing was automated. At Lamers, we have ca. 2000 documents to manage, so altering or replacing documents was a time-consuming business.

Quality inspection and certification for a complex and technically groundbreaking industrial sector requires absolute transparency of management, which is what AlisQI now delivers.

Everything is registered in AlisQI: customer complaints, flaws and audit findings as well as the entire chain of follow-up actions. Product deviations and any incidents or accidents are alerted in AlisQI, and reports are generated on the basis of that information.

“Every week we create what we call a monitor which details our performance with regards to rejection levels, complaints and workplace inspections,” says Segers. This information is shared on screens throughout the Lamers facility. “So everyone in the factory can see the Quality performance of the previous week.”

Lamers is currently implementing the Quality Control & LIMS module of the AlisQI solution. This is proceeding well, not least because Segers and his team (like so many AlisQI customers before them) are exploring the platform’s flexibility to create new ways of doing things.

Reporting is one example. Every customer particular formatting requirements so Segers had his team create Word templates that pull the information out of AlisQI in the right customer format with a single click of the mouse. “No need to copy and paste,” Segers comments.

He envisages that in the near future, once everything is registered in AlisQI, automated reporting could be further refined and that would speed things up even more.

Another example of how AlisQI paves the way for invention is the ERP system. Almost every ERP system can be connected to the AlisQI platform, but Lamers has thought of a way to make this even easier by using the QR codes. The operator uses a tablet to scan the QR code to the supporting document and AlisQI immediately finds the right form which is opened in the right place, ready for the Q-details to be added and the form to be digitally completed.

“We have to record more and more things and that’s a real incentive to invent smart and useful ways of working,” says Segers.

Before AlisQI, a lot of data was stored on a local drive or with the metering unit. “Every report we needed had to be set up manually using different databases.”

We already saw how in the experience of Geert Segers, AlisQI differentiates itself from other Quality Management Systems. This is becoming more evident with time – and evident to everyone in Lamers, not only its QHSE Manager.

Segers comments: “AlisQI helps us to get buy-in from others in the organization, and to engage in our story.”

Lamers technicians and customer-facing staff working on location can deploy AlisQI as easily as their colleagues in Nijmegen. “This is making the provision of information and complaints handling a lot simpler,” says Segers.

“We do almost everything in AlisQI,” he continues. “We try to solve as much as possible using AlisQI and if we think, ‘You know what, we should do that too’, we create a new group type and so that we can have that data in our Platform too.”