Igloo Products manufactures 18 million coolers a year across 18 assembly lines in a 1.8 million square foot facility in Katy, Texas. Their quality control process ran entirely on paper. When something went wrong, finding the data for a root cause analysis meant hours of digging through boxes of records. After digitizing their quality data collection with Alpha Software, that search takes seconds. The result: $145,000 in documented cost savings and 100% paperless operations.
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A Focus on Quality Control
A significant key to the success of companies that sell consumer products is a laser-like focus on product quality, specifically quality control. The products are often sold by word of mouth, and if people begin experiencing problems with Igloo coolers and other products, they’re less likely to recommend Igloo. In addition, poor quality control leads to a higher rate of products that aren’t suitable for sale, eating into a company’s bottom line.
Igloo runs a 24-hour/seven-day-a-week 1.8-million-square-foot three-building facility in Katy, Texas. It has 121 molding machines and 18 assembly lines and manufactures 18 million coolers annually. Igloo has plans to manufacture even more because Dometic, a Swedish company that acquired Igloo in 2021, wants the facility to begin manufacturing for it as well.
Taking Igloo Quality Control Data Digital
Igloo has traditionally been a leader in quality control. In recent years, the company has launched a program to improve it more, called Igloo Quality IQ365. As part of that effort, Igloo Manager of Quality Control John Ng wanted to change how the team conducted audits. Previously, they had completed the work on paper. He wanted it to become entirely digital.
“I felt that this paper audit is not value-added, and we needed to digitally transform it,” he explains. “The big plan was to transform everything to the cloud.”
From Paper-Based Inspections to Digital Quality Workflows
Before this project, Igloo collected quality data on paper and manually entered it into downstream systems. Working with Alpha Software, Igloo replaced those paper-based processes with mobile workflows tailored to the way inspections were actually performed on the shop floor.
The new approach gave the team faster access to quality information, reduced manual data entry, and improved confidence in the data being used for reporting and analysis. While Igloo's long-term plan is to move this information through a cloud architecture and into Oracle, the company is already using Power Query, Power Pivot, and Power BI to gain value from the data being collected today.
The outcome: an estimated $145,000 in documented savings, a very low cost of ownership, and the elimination of paper from the quality process.
"We now have a very low cost of ownership and an estimated soft saving of $145,000," said Ng. "We are now one hundred percent paperless."
Digitizing Paper Forms For More Accurate Data and Operational Visibility
Before digitization, Igloo's quality audits required four separate paper forms across blow molding, injection molding, and vacuum form processes. Alpha Software consolidated those into a single digital workflow, used by inspectors on iPads directly on the shop floor.
The new system also gave supervisors something they didn't have before: real-time visibility into machine status across the facility, with a dashboard showing red, green, or yellow indicators for each machine at a glance.
Automated notifications now alert quality technicians when new data is available and when machines are due for inspection, removing the manual follow-up that previously fell through the cracks. Many other processes and workflows have been digitized using Alpha Transform as well.
Delivering Fewer Errors, Fewer Product Defects to Manufacturing Quality Teams
Data is paperless, which reduces errors and leads to better decision-making. For example, when someone sees a scribbled number "5" on a paper form, and it is interpreted as a "7". The entire quality control process has been accelerated, so the information is more trustworthy. New kinds of information can be captured as well, such as defects in cooler lids.
Summing up the benefits of the solution built by the Alpha Software team using Alpha TransForm, Ng explains, “Previously, I could spend hours looking through boxes of paper and storage for a specific date and for assembly shift information that I needed for my root cause analysis to try to figure out what happened when something went wrong. Now I can just search by date and pull up the form pictures. It's helped tremendously.”
Alpha Software has helped hundreds of manufacturers to quickly turn paper forms into mobile apps and dashboards that collect more accurate quality data quickly and easily and measure performance.
Could Your Facility Realize Results Like Igloo's $145,000+ in Savings?
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