A global reference in decorative surface solutions, Impress Decor produces impregnated papers, decorative papers, finish foils, paints, and lacquers for wood panel, furniture, and flooring industries. With annual revenue of €239 million, Impress Decor has over 800 employees dedicated to providing top-tier design and technology solutions. The company operates seven production units worldwide, plus headquarters and four sales/service offices.

Challenge

Impress Decor Brazil sought a quality management solution where information was centralized and easily accessible to all stakeholders. Amid expanding production capacity, its main challenges were linking machine parameters to final product quality and efficiently quantifying machine downtime.

Solution

The company chose InfinityQS, smart-manufacturing and quality-control software featuring a powerful SPC tool. Exclusively offered in Brazil and South America by HarboR Informática Industrial, Impress Decor engaged HarboR consultancy to implement InfinityQS tailored to its specific needs: managing data collections via Dynamic Scheduler and automatically collecting machine parameters through DMS-DCS services. The implementation included HarboR-led training to ensure the team understood SPC methodology and InfinityQS configuration features.

“We launched the pilot project on one of our production lines and in just two months it was established. We extended it to the other four lines in our Brazil facility, and within four months the full implementation was complete. Benefits were immediate: we observed improved organization, centralization and clarity in both process and product data, enabling safer and more assertive actions. User adoption was quick due to the intuitive interface. The fact that InfinityQS logs the name of the operator who registered the data was motivational, as they feel responsible for their work.”

– Gabriela Castro Souza, Process Engineer

Results

Through automatic collection of parameters and data, InfinityQS helped Impress Decor Brazil gain deeper insight into process behavior.
Machine stops are identified automatically, and production downtime only resumes when the operator justifies the stoppage. This architecture enabled the company to quantify downtime and its causes, identifying key bottlenecks to target first. Operational efficiency improvements are readily noticeable: tasks that took two days for data retrieval and analysis are now accomplished in fifteen minutes using InfinityQS. With full deployment across the company, Impress Decor continues seeking new applications for InfinityQS, using it as its main ally in continuous process improvement.

• Results noticed from the first month of use
• Identification of causes that helped reduce color-match time by 28%
• Bottleneck identification: 17% reduction in losses due to splice breaks in only 15 days
• Immediate identification of 100% nonconformities, reported via email to those responsible
• Improved results interpretation, ensuring agile decision‑making and defect reduction
• Agility in information organization and traceability