The software has been designed in response to the PAT initiative put forward by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2002. PAT allows companies to monitor their manufacturing processes continuously and automatically in real time, rather than intermittently and historically via samples and post-manufacturing quality controls.
This improves manufacturing quality and saves money, because it is cheaper to adjust a production line immediately than to discard goods that have fallen outside the agreed tolerances.
The new software package, Curvaceous Visual Explorer, is already finding customers across the pharmaceutical, chemical and food industries, according to the company. One early adopter is AstraZeneca, which says that it is seeing benefits in terms of reduced waste and increased throughput.
At the heart of the system is Curvaceous' proprietary Geometric Process Control (GPC) technology, which can model an entire process step and provide continuous quality assurance, so that quality violations can be prevented by giving the operator real time guidance.
CVE can portray hundreds of variables on a single interactive graph. Not only does this allow multivariate relationships to be discovered but it also heightens the process understanding of all involved, allowing in depth analysis of every part of the process.
This visual approach makes the presentation of findings easy allowing decisions to be quickly reached as to which development route to follow, according to Curvaceous.