Supelco

Supelco is a leader in the development and manufacture of chromatography products and accessories. The Bellefonte headquarters is the world's largest single facility dedicated to the advancement of separation technologies, however, the firm has subsidiaries, distributors, and manufacturing facilities throughout the world. This project focuses on the workflow and capacity of QA instruments and technicians for the Capillary Finished Goods Products. Supelco manufactures more than 300 different capillary finished good products, which are made in batches of 2 to 16 columns. 100% inspection is used. Columns are tested in assigned gas chromatographs. Assignment varies mainly due to column dimensions (internal diameter and length) or test requirements (chromatographic injection and detection systems). Test times range between 1/2 and 2 1/2 hours depending on the product. Columns passing specification are approved and packaged immediately. All others are considered for re-testing and/or rework. After all appropriate testing of a batch is complete, the columns are taken to the finished good warehouse. QA is currently a constraint on the production of Capillary finished goods. The goal of the project is to critically evaluate and make recommendations to increase the throughput of this process. This project actually folds into a bigger internal project focused on cutting cycle time to reduce inventories and become more of a JIT system.

Back to Learning Activities