Thermon Leverages ProcessMAP EHSQ Mobile Apps To Drive Quality And Compliance

ProcessMAP > EHS Software > Thermon Leverages ProcessMAP EHSQ Mobile Apps To Drive Quality And Compliance

Thermon serves the global energy, power generation and chemical markets by providing safe, reliable and innovative mission-critical industrial process heating solutions. Founded in 1954, the company went public in 2011. Thermon has more than 1,500 employees operating on six continents in 17 countries around the globe, specializing in providing complete flow assurance, process heating, temperature maintenance, freeze protection and environmental monitoring solutions.

Thermon has achieved numerous quality certifications, most importantly the ISO 9001, the internationally recognized standard for Quality Management Systems. It verifies that their method of manufacturing a product or providing a service has been designed to ensure a high-quality outcome for the customer.

The Quality Management department is responsible for maintaining the quality management system, or QMS program that is ISO 9001 certified. The team’s main functions include auditing, improvement projects, processing support of customer complaints, non-conformances and corrective actions, data evaluation, and training administration. The Quality Management team also works on several projects to reduce costs and to ensure compliance with standards. To help accomplish that, the company utilizes ProcessMAP’s industry leading EHSQ software.

Prior to Using ProcessMAP

Prior to adopting ProcessMAP, Thermon’s QMS team worked with a paper-based system for quality management. They faced challenges in tracking non-conformances, customer complaints and corrective actions. The majority of the team’s efforts were focused towards suppliers. At that time, there was no formal trend analysis being performed. The QMS was required to perform tracking, data analysis and also help drive accomplishing action items. Management accountability was very important, along with the participation of different departments within the project efforts to actually make them successful. One important objective was to have an increase in reporting while also reducing costs and performing continuous improvement.

What Thermon Was Looking For

A Global interactive system – The team wanted to standardize the system to where everybody would report non-conformances, customer complaints and corrective actions in the same way. The more the system was standardized, the easier it would be to comply with those standards and to deliver the best quality to Thermon’s customers.
Management accountability – The team wanted to design their QMS system to actually drive the management team to be more accountable for participating in the process and solving issues.
Compliance with Standards – There are numerous requirements that Thermon must meet in order to comply with ISO 9001 standards. The ProcessMAP system has greatly helped Thermon to review and ensure they are meeting all the necessary requirements to achieve internal and external product and service excellence.

Utilizing ProcessMAP Mobile EHSQ Solutions

ProcessMAP’s Reviqo no-code App Development and Deployment (AD&D) platform and the Insight business analytics and visualization solution offered an integration solution that helped the Thermon team to dive into their data analysis, identify trends and develop quick, data-driven corrective actions that achieved the financial goals such as where the business needed to produce cost-reduction initiatives, where to actually spend budget, and where to drive continuous-improvement projects.

Because of Reviqo app studio’s comprehensive customization and configuration capabilities, Thermon’s team seamlessly migrated from manual systems to a highly efficient digital data management solution. The team focused on making easy and fast reporting tools for Thermon employees to access from the system. Automatic notifications helped Thermon to improve management accountability. The management team received emails when non-conformance, corrective actions and customer complaints were raised to the Quality department. Management was able to see the overall picture and they could take quicker decisions and actions towards resolving any problems.

Results and Performance

The Quality team shares results with the senior management team and ensures that the employees themselves stay engaged with the EHSQ system and see the results down the line. Thermon realized 300% increased reporting over a year with all the departments participating within the system. The company also realized 65% faster non-conformance completion turnaround time. The process is actually the process as a whole being faster and being more efficient that actually helped employees to go through, solve issues, find information faster and then get back to customers and ensure a high level of customer satisfaction.

In less than six months, Thermon identified eight cost-reduction initiatives based on the trend analysis in less than six months. Finally, the Quality team discovered six new key performance indicators never measured before – the NCR corrective action and close-out turn around time and close ratio. Right now we are able to correlate our EAP System data against what we collect within the ProcessMAP system to perform root cause analysis and drive actions from there.

The Quality team learned it is very important to have multi-department collaboration. With the help of ProcessMAP’s software collaboration between departments was much improved. The team also came to understand how to take advantage of the software properly and communicate its value to internal and external representatives. When going through a huge change, it is better to start with a simple, step-by-step process and expand upon it later on. Having clear criteria and goals also helped with the culture change and engagement of other departments.