Solution · Operations
Your quality system tells you the rate. It can't tell you why. Foreman pairs the defect report with the upstream process data, pins the cause to the station, shift, and parameter that drove it, and writes the corrective-action draft for your engineer to review.
The pain
The SPC chart shows the spike. The quality engineer asks the obvious question: what changed? And then the spreadsheet detective game starts. Pull the part numbers, pull the shift, pull the MES events, pull the upstream process parameters, pull the operator changeover log — and try to find the line that explains the chart.
Two days later, the explanation is plausible but not provable. The corrective action is filed against the most likely station and the OEM accepts it because they have to. Nobody believes the same defect won't be back in three weeks, because nobody truly knows what caused this one.
The data to answer the question exists — in the MES, the historian, the inline-inspection feed, and the SPC system. It just doesn't exist in the same view. The engineer who could correlate it is the same engineer building OEE decks on Monday morning.
What Foreman does about it
When the defect rate moves, Foreman cross-references the affected parts with the stations they passed through, the shifts they ran on, and the operators who handled them. The first answer is which station — not 'somewhere on the line'.
Built on · Decision Layer
Foreman pulls the upstream process data from the historian — temperature, pressure, force, cycle time — and shows which parameter drifted before the defect appeared. The chart and the chart's cause land in the same view.
Built on · Digital Twin
Once the cause is pinned, Foreman drafts the corrective action — the parameter to bring back, the station to re-qualify, the operator to retrain. Your engineer accepts, edits, or rejects — and the audit trail records what was decided and why.
Built on · Agent Engine
Every defect investigation lives in one record: the data inputs, the agent's reasoning, the corrective action, and the verification result. When the OEM auditor asks, the answer is one query — not a meeting reconstruction six weeks later.
Built on · Decision Layer
What we'd move
From SPC spike to a ranked root-cause hypothesis with the supporting parameter trace attached.
Cross-source correlation per investigation: MES + historian + inspection, joined automatically.
Investigations logged with hypotheses, evidence, and decision — OEM-audit-ready by default.
* Discovery-stage estimates from defect-investigation walkthroughs at Tier-2 plants. Replaced with measured numbers as pilots run.
The one outcome that matters
We won't quote a percent-reduction-in-defects figure we can't ship under your roof. The number that moves is the time between SPC spike and pinned root cause. Foreman collapses it from days of detective work to a single agent run.
Where it lands
MES & SPC
Wonderware, Opcenter, FactoryTalk, Minitab Connect — Foreman ingests defect events, part genealogy, and SPC outputs as one connected record.
Historian
Process parameters from PI, Aveva, MQTT, or OPC-UA — joined to the same parts the defect was found on, with millisecond-grade alignment.
Inline inspection
Vision systems, gauges, CMM exports. Whatever stream is already producing pass/fail data feeds the agent's correlation engine.
Foreman is read-only on your quality and process systems. The drafted corrective actions are written into the system your team already approves them in — no parallel workflow. See the full integration list →
Industry fit
A 30-minute call to walk through the defect, the systems you'd have to read to explain it, and where Foreman would have answered first.
