STATISTICA Blogs

Background
Aluminerie Alouette is located in Sept-Îles, on Quebec’s North Shore. Inaugurated in 1992, Aluminerie Alouette is an independently operated company producing primary aluminum. With its 1000 employees and an annual production capacity of over 575,000 tons, it is the largest employer in Sept-Îles and the leading aluminum smelter in the Americas. The Sept-Îles smelter is a worldwide benchmark for energy consumption per ton of aluminum produced.  Innovative, it uses state-of-the-art technology.

The Six Sigma Methodology
After having been trained and worked on Six sigma projects, STATISTICA software has become an essential tool being used by all Alouette’s process management teams. Indeed, the complete integration of Six Sigma in STATISTICA that regroups all the tools all necessary analyses for each step of the methodology (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) helps to carry out projects. In other words, the accessibility and centralization of the quality control charts for each of the manufacturing departments allow improvement of the overall process management.

Alouette uses STATISTICA to monitor approximately twenty gauging points on its 594 aluminum production units each week.

The ad hoc analyses by our Technology Development Team (R&D) and monitoring of the different sector/sub-plants are other examples of how STATISTICA can be used In fact STATISTICA provides the status of our processes and helps in decision-making.

In addition, STATISTICA helps our IT, engineers and process control technicians to easily access our database with the help of SQL queries and mostly with the help of the utility software.

The complete automation of our quality control charts, our weekly and monthly reports as well as all queries widely used by our employees, are some of the reasons why Aluminerie Alouette chose STATISTICA.

Conclusion
The implementation of STATISTICA and STATISTICA Enterprise at Aluminerie Alouette is a huge value-added project which offers better monitoring tools. 

Aluminerie Alouette wishes to highlight the assistance and implication of the StatSoft France staff during the implementation of STATISTICA version 8 as well as during the migration to version 9.