Digital Quality Control Logbooks
A research project with AstraZeneca replacing paper-based QC logbooks with a digital system, reducing manual errors and accelerating audits.
- Role
- Undergraduate researcher, Purdue's Data Mine
- Built
- May 2025
- Stack
- Quality Control systems, Requirements gathering, Regulated manufacturing
The problem
Quality Control ran on paper logbooks. Hand-written records make errors easy to introduce and hard to catch, and they make audits slow, because anything an auditor wants to trace has to be found in a binder first.
What we built
A digital system to replace the paper logbooks, which reduced manual errors and accelerated the audit process.
Where the difficulty actually was
In a regulated manufacturing environment the constraint isn’t “can we digitize this”; it’s whether the digital version preserves an audit trail that will hold up. A record has to show who entered what and when, and what the value was before somebody changed it. That requirement shaped the design more than the interface did.
Context
Delivered through The Data Mine at Purdue University, a corporate-partnered undergraduate research program, during the 2024-2025 academic year. The AstraZeneca project page has the poster and the final video walkthrough.