Spectra QEST has specialised in delivering innovative software solutions for the construction materials production and testing industries for almost 25 years.
Asphalt producing customers use Spectra QEST's QESTLab to improve quality control in asphalt production and promote best testing practice in the laboratories they operate. Compliance with test standards and road authority specifications becomes easier to achieve and demonstrate. Laboratories become much more efficient, best practice is easier to enforce and the test data can be retrieved easily, presented effectively and examined much more meaningfully.
The benefits to asphalt producers are in two main areas of their operations: in the laboratory that tests the asphalt, and in producing quality control and quality assurance reports for production control purposes.
In the laboratory, QESTLab enables asphalt producers to:
- Quickly and easily track work progress and plan upcoming work in the laboratory;
- Manage samples and testing data;
- Quickly and reliably calculate test results;
- Automatically check results against specifications;
- Ensure consistent reporting formats between individual tests;
- Easily track and manage equipment calibration;
- Easily enforce structured (and on-line) data approval on three levels: system supports data 'entered by', 'checked by' and 'approved by' record keeping;
- Reduce report turn around times due to rapid data entry, on-line checking and on-line approval followed by automatically generated test reports distributed electronically;
- Have full auditability/traceability with no overhead cost: the comprehensive audit trail is maintained automatically;
- Automate the billing process to increase efficiency and reduce missed billing;
- Support the testing from various disciplines in a single centralised system including asphalt, aggregates, concrete, soils, etc.;
- Quickly and easily access aggregates data if the company also used QESTLab for its aggregate testing operations;
- Quickly and easily produce QA/QC reports from the test data; and
- Quickly and easily produce the complex reports that some Departments of Transport demand in their specifications.
From a production perspective, QESTLab brings significant benefits to asphalt producers, because it:
- Significantly reduces the time taken for the laboratory to produce and distribute material test reports;
- Allows testing and reporting to be done on a single system for multiple disciplines (e.g. aggregates, asphalt, concrete, etc.) allowing companies that cover multiple disciplines to access data and test reports from the other disciplines in one system; and
- Allows the setup of fully customised production and QA/QC reports, including historical material performance tables and charts.
The system can be implemented in a single location, however for companies with multiple operations, a centralised implementation of the system brings significant additional benefits, including:
- Standardising processes and practices across multiple operations, with greater centralised control and document management;
- Ensuring consistent reports (both material test reports and production QA/QC reports) are produced across the organisation;
- Providing a seamless work environment for employees that move to a different location;
- Providing centrally available data, which in turn makes it very efficient to manage from an infrastructure/IT point of view;
and
- Enabling benchmarking and corporate level monitoring of efficiencies between the different business units.
This is not an exhaustive list of the features of QESTLab. It gives an indication of some of the most common benefits that customers have reported after they have implemented the system. For more information on QESTLab, please click here, or contact Spectra QEST sales.
