The Certificate of Analysis
One of the nice things about being a Solution Architect across the process industry is when you see patterns emerge in what can seem like two different ends of the industrial spectrum. One of these areas for me is the Certificate of Analysis (CoA) message. Looking back on my first B2B projects – about 12 years ago – was a CoA project with a major international semiconductor manufacturer. The company I was working for was selling exceptionally high end industrial gases (parts per billion specifications) to the hi-tech fabs. This particular company wanted to see our CoA’s before they even left our production facilities. They would then accept or reject the particular product on the basis of the electronic CoA. We even built a CoA reject message and had an internal workflow which included internal NCR’s (Non Conformance Report). We would then carry out quality RCA’s (Root Cause Analysis) for each rejected product. This lead to a constant cycle of improvements and tightened the already good relationship with this major customer.
Over the last dozen or so years working with and for Elemica I have seen the CoA on clients radars, but only seen a handful of projects. A few years ago I did an analysis to see why that was and the (very unscientific) outcome I came to was twofold;
Quality is incredibly important for process industry companies, it has a loud voice in production, but a quiet whisper in driving IT projects. It is easy to see it as a cost creator (if you are myopic) or a cost reducer (if you understand the effects of quality issues) but never a revenue generator
Quality measurement comes from many different systems and historically was not automated through centralised systems
This meant that IT projects for quality systems were difficult to raise above the clamour for CRM or SCM systems and if they did raise their heads they were complicated to do for suppliers. It is difficult being the quiet hard working kid at the front of the class when the loud jocks at the back are stealing the attention.
Then a few weeks ago I was asked to discuss the Elemica CoA solution with a major tyre company. I had seen requests grow for CoA solutions over the last 12 months. We have seen it in RFP’s, I have sat in front of chemical companies discussing CoA’s and CoO’s (Certificate of Origins) and now I was being asked to discuss the value to buyers.
You always worry when you sit in front of a customer to discuss a topic, but to my (probably obvious) delight all the things I knew as a seller of product was still valid. It is 8 years since I worked for a process industry company and one does worry that one gets out of touch. Some of the points I did get validation on where;
CoA’s are driven from product specifications, these can either by generic or can be very specific driven by high end R&D and very complex molecules
Batch management driven from the possible need for product recall is critical
Management of the master data is complex and often sits in different systems
The ways that CoA’s are delivered to a company are many and varied
These were the similar reasons that we had managed to justify the project with the semi-conductor company a dozen years ago. So the pain has not gone away. However, when we delved into it in detail we started to realise some important value cases and some cost reduction areas.
1) The company I was talking to had all of the CoA data in SAP and all the product specification was all delivered by one system, so this reduced the cost of the project
2) No product could be released for production until the CoA data had been inputted into SAP and ALL of the specifications had been passed
3) That product “out of specification” was rare, but missing CoA’s or missing data was very common
4) That a quality person in each production site was keying in CoA data, which was taking them away from value added jobs like quality audits
What was pleasant, as I sat there, was realising we can fix all of that. We have a CoA solution already, we have CoA messaging already flowing in the Supply Chain Operating Network (SCON) and we have the business process knowledge to make an implementation project efficient to deliver value quickly. We are currently building the scope for workshops and implementations, therefore I think it will be a “watch this space”. I predict this client delivering a case study which will make all process industry buyers sit up and think.
So, I think that we are seeing the return of a forgotten process step. We see simplified flows of order-to-cash or requisition-to-pay, I think that the Certificate of Analysis and Quality steps can hold its head high and re-insert itself with pride.