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Transcript

NAPT Intra Manager: Manage Your Proficiency Testing Program Online

Richard Brynteson:  So, my name is Richard Brynteson, and I am the Managing Director at NAPT. I want to welcome everyone for coming to our webinar about Intra Manager. This is the first of what we hope is going to be many webinars on this topic and others.

Watch the webinar on-demand

Our goal today is to do a handful of things. We want to talk about what's included with the ILC Manager, what you should expect. We're going to spend a lot of time on the demo. We'll do a review, we'll talk about what's on the roadmap for the future, and then we'll answer some questions along the way as well. So again, if you have questions, feel free to ask them and we will get them answered either at the end or along the way.

So at a high level, what can the Intra Manager do for you and your organization? It's really five items.

We want to empower organizations to be able to design your own proficiency testing. We want you to be able to add your participants and schedule them.

Obviously, submit data, view those results, and then compare the results against everyone in your organization. That's the high -level goal of the interim manager, and we want to do this in a way that is incredibly easy for you to use, so that you do not have to struggle through entering data or going through the entire process of an intra. The Intra should be easy and we hope that we have accomplished that for you. So like I said, we're going to spend a lot of time in the demo and I'm going to jump into it right now.

So give me a moment as I move some things on my screen real quick.

Right now, I'm logged into the NAPT customer portal, so up at the top you'll see that there's an Intra button and this allows me to go ahead and create my Intra.

So what we want to do is we want to start and we're going to create a brand new one from scratch so everyone can see the process from start to finish. So I'm going to go ahead and click on my order my next Intra and when this screen pops up it's going to give you two options of your Intra. The first is you're managing it yourself, a self-managed Intra. You're in charge from start to finish and that's what we're going to talk about today in depth. The other option is where NAPT helps you with that Intra process and we do all the data entry. But we really believe that we're going to be able to do that, that the future is allowing you to manage your Intra from start to finish, because it will be the easiest and best way to do it.

So I'm going to go ahead and say that I want to purchase that now.

The first thing it's going to ask you is to just give you a name for this Intra so that you can know what it is later on. So I'm going to call this my IntraConeDimensional, and that's all I need to do.

So I'm going to give it a name and we'll remember that name here in a moment. So I'm going to click Order. It's going to go ahead and bring me to the review screen and what should I expect?

Well, the great thing about a self -managed Intra is you can start working on it immediately. We're actually going to finish and do an entire Intra in the next 30 minutes. So I'm going to close that screen. I'm going to click on Pending Development. So on the left -hand side, you'll see there are three different options, a four with the order.

We see the Intras that are in progress, we see those that are pending, and we've seen the ones that we've completed so far. So I'm going to click on Pending, and you'll see that I've ordered a bunch here as tests, but here's the one I just created. So I'm going to go ahead and click on that, and it's going to ask me and walk me through a wizard to build my intra for my organization. We'll talk about the different limits, but you can see here that we can have up to six artifacts, 25 measured values, and 20 data submittals. So I'm going to go ahead and start the wizard. The first screen is just going to tell you some information.

Do you have your kit information? Do you know what your measured values are?

Your basic scheme information, who your participants are, these are the things that you want to know before you start the process at just a really high level. I thankfully have all that information on me, so I'm going to go ahead and proceed to the next step.

On this screen is where we're going to do the vast majority of the setup of our Intra.

To begin with, so the very first thing it asks is what is that name? We name that before during the order process. Here I've got a description, so if I wanted to have some sort of more detailed description about this Intra, what it does, how it works, I could put that in here. I need to pick who's going to coordinate this, so I'm going to go ahead. I'll pick Travis Kelsey in this case.

And then it's going to ask me what algorithm do I want to use when we want to determine our established values and uncertainty.

I have different options. I'm going to leave it at robust analysis, but you can see here we have weighted mean and mean and then how do we determine our outliers? So by default it's 2 sigma. You can again pick whatever you want in here. I'm going to leave it at that.

The next piece right here is this ISO 1745 compliant. If I check this box, I need to go through the entire scheme development process. That's the design, the prep, the distribution, that process that you would see in the ISO 1743 standard. I'm gonna leave that turned off for now, just for the sake of time, but know that you could go through and answer all the questions that are part of that. And then at the bottom, what is the name of our kit? What are we doing? I'm just gonna go ahead and leave this and call it just the dimensional kit. But again, you could name it whatever you want. So I'm gonna go ahead and go to the next screen.

On the next screen now, what we need to do in the wizard is we need to enter the artifacts that we're gonna be testing with.

So in this case, I have a hexagon manufacturer. I have a model number of an NCA7 and then I'm going to put in the serial number.

This is optional, but you would enter whatever your manufacturer is in the model number at a bare minimum and then you could enter serial numbers. I'm going to click add artifact and you'll see at the bottom it's been added and I could add more to this if I wanted to, but for the sake of time I'm just going to add the one so that you can see it. But that again we talked about in this instance I could add up to six artifacts and this is again just being able for you to keep track of what's happening in your organization. So we finished adding our artifacts and now the next piece is what are the measured values.

So again remember when we started all this we knew certain basic info what our artifact are, what we're trying to measure, you know who's going to participate.

So we're going to go ahead I'm just going to enter in a single measured value so you can see what that process looks like. So this will be dimensional. We're going to set the nominal value. I'm going to say 361, the description. I'm going to put in measured value 1, and I'm just going to call this cone 1. And then in this case, the resolution or the number of numbers after the period, this is going to have a resolution of 3. And we're going to scroll a little bit and find my millimeters.

There we go. And I'm going to hit add, and we've added that measured value to our Intra.

Again, we've not entered any data, and this value here is really just for you and so that you know what it is. It's not required. It's not like the test value or anything like that. So again, I could enter more measured values if I wanted to. I could enter up to 25 of them. I'm going to go ahead and just do this one again for the sake of time, and we're going to add the next.

The last part is we need to know who's going to participate. So I can either pick from a list of existing technicians that I already have defined in my organization or I could add new participants if I wanted to. I'm going to make this easy on myself and I'm just going to come in here.

I'll pick John, I'll pick Roger, I'll pick Tracy, and I'll add them to my Intra.

The key thing to know here is you need a bare minimum of three individuals in order to do an Intra. So that could be the same person and maybe they do the measurements twice on different days, but you do need to have at least three. Again, I could add more if I wanted to, but we're going to keep it easy because I don't want you to have to watch me enter 25 sets of data. That'd be boring.

So we're going to go ahead and finish and we're going to come to this summary and it tells us that we've completed the entire wizard. Everything is set up and we are now ready to continue through the process of our intra. So that is the entire setup of our intra inside the intra manager. Seven easy steps and remember we really just enter data on four of those seven. The other ones are just informational. So I'm going to go ahead and close that I'm going to go back to in progress intras and there's my dimensional sitting right there ready to be used and I can go ahead and continue to process it. Now typically this is where you would go and you would share the information with technicians. What is the test? What maybe an information sheet? How to perform it? All those kind of wonderful things.

But we're obviously going to assume that we've done all of that information and we're going to go ahead and jump right into this portion of it.

So the very first thing is we can see who the participants are. I could add additional participants if I wanted to. Maybe when I set this up, maybe I'd forgotten two or three people and I just need to add them, or a new technician came on board. But I'm going to leave it as is, but know that you could add additional individuals here. Down below, you see those that are scheduled. So I can set some things just for me to be able to keep track of stuff. So I could set some scheduled dates.

So let's say John's going to do it on this day and John is in Iowa.

So I could set that information and you'll see that it updates immediately. So I could go through this and set this for each individual if I wanted to, probably not on a Saturday. I will continue to set those different locations and that information in here. So that's the very first thing. And it's just kind of a nice scheduling option so that you can kind of track what's happening in your organization.

When you're done, we do offer a schedule report.

So this is just a printable report that you can print out. Gives you the same information you see here just so that it's in that printable format. Before I continue, I do want to call up this big, huge blue banner here at the top. And this is important to realize that before I've submitted any data, I could come into the configuration and I could change items about my Intra. For example, maybe I want to add an artifact or add an additional measured value.

I can do that any time prior to submitting data. As soon as I submit any data for any participant though, then this is going to get locked out and I can't change it, and that's just for the integrity of the intra. You wouldn't want to be changing measured values after you've already started submitting data. So I'm going to come back to the participant, and here I've got my ability to submit results. So I'm going to go ahead, I'm going to click on these, I'm going to enter in these results really fast, and that's why we only did the four of them, so you didn't have to watch me type for too long, 0700, and I'm going to go ahead and confirm this. It's going to come up and ask you, are you sure these are the correct values? These are in my case, so I'm going to go ahead and say yes. So I've submitted that first one.

I'm going to do the other two really quickly so I can run analysis on this so that you can see the power of the Intra Manager. So 0 .04, same item. And we'll do it one last time. It's 361952.

All right, perfect. And there we go. I've gone ahead and I've entered all of my data. Now I could run my data analysis, but I do want to call it. There are some new features that you can do inside the Intra Manager. So if I click on this fact that this is a completed process, it'll show me two items here. First, there's some notes and appendix that I can enter about this particular submission. Whatever you type in this space will appear on the individual's report at the end, which is critical to know. So we want to be able to, maybe there are specific instructions they did, or they did something in the process. You could notate and annotate that information so that you had saved it going forward. The other piece here is you'll notice there is the ability to edit this value. So let's say you inadvertently typed in the number wrong, maybe there was a revision to your data for whatever reason, you can go back and modify individual measured values, and you'll notice that you have the power then to mark this data as revised. So when data is revised, it will be annotated on the report at the end to let you know that it has been changed and updated.

In this case, I'm just going to leave it, but know that you do have the ability to make revisions to your data.

Now we've entered all of our data. We're going to go to the next step and that's data analysis. Before I do that, I do have to mark this as a paid ILC. So one moment, close it, reopen it. There we go. So when we look at data analysis, there's really two ways that we can go about it. We can use the ISO 13 .528 standard and allow the system to calculate the established reference value and uncertainty based on the measurements that were entered. Or maybe your organization has a manual set of measured values that you know should happen.

You as the coordinator can choose which one you want to do.

In this case, I'm going to go ahead and use the ISO standard and I'm going to let it run that analysis. Remember, we selected way back at the beginning, what are outlier methods and what our analysis was. So I'm going to say run analysis.

Then it's going to come up and show me what my calculated reference value and calculated reference uncertainties are. So if I'm happy with those and there's not much you can really do at this point other than cancel out, so I'm going to go ahead and hit save and those are now saved as my reference values for this this Intra. If I click on results now, I see my three participants and I can click on the individual results and it will show me now their measured value and their uncertainty they typed, what the reference value and uncertainty was, and then information such as their ease of end, whether or not it's a satisfactory or unsatisfactory measurement. And I could look at this for each individual if I wanted to and be able to kind of review that before we continue on. The key thing to know is I can't print any reports until I mark this Intra as complete.

Once I've completed it, then I can have all the printed reports and do everything I want. So in this case, I'm going to mark it as complete, but keep in mind that once you mark that Intra as complete, you can't add additional participants or anything else like that. So you're kind of drawing that line in the sand. We've completed this Intra. We want to get the results for it, and we can go ahead and finish it off. So I'm going to mark it as complete, and now what we're going to see is it's going to bring me to the final page. I can view the results here. I can also print them. So I'm going to go ahead and click on this printed report real quick.

And if I scroll down, I'm going to go ahead and see my full information that you're familiar with if you've ever seen any of the NAPT final reports. So here I can see my average of values, the uncertainty, ease of end, z -score, and all that wonderful stuff.

This is just a taste of how easy it is to run through the entire process. At this point, I've completed the entire Intra. I've scheduled it, I entered my participant data, I've ran analysis, and I've been able to pull my reports on it. The great thing about the Intra Manager is when I want and I want to order my next Intra, let's say it's six months later, and I'm going to call this Cone 2, and I order it, and we come back to pending intras, you'll notice I have the ability to repeat an existing Intra. So I can come in here, find the one we just finished, and import in all of that data we had before. So all of the measured values, the artifacts, all that information automatically gets moved to the next Intra. So if you're an organization that runs a similar Intra every six or 12 months, you just need to set it up the one time, and then you can repeat the process and add in the new participants for each individual time.

It's a fantastic way to be able to make it very repeatable for you and your organization when running your intras. So I'm going to go ahead and take a breath there. If you've got any questions again, feel free to put them in the chat or into the Q &A or raise your hand. We can always pull you off mute as well. So I'm going to come back to the PowerPoint real quick.

I'm going to go through some of the other items that are in here.

So we talked about what are the features, right? So you have the ability to find the artifacts you're using in your Intra. You can add up to 25 measured values and 20 participants. Set that location.

For each participant, submit the data and add that submission note. And you'll notice below that all of our NAPT members have different pricing. So anytime you're a member of NAPT, you always receive that 20 % discount. So what you're seeing below in the table is the pricing difference and the option differences for NAPT members versus non -members. So if you're not a member today, it's a great opportunity to support the organization and be able to get a little bit more out of the Intra Manager. So we always want to talk about what's coming soon, right? So the first thing you might be asking is when can I use this? This is rolling out tonight and the Intra Manager will be available to everyone who has access to the customer portal starting tomorrow. So that's really exciting.

We do have some really exciting things that are coming up in the next 30 days as well. That's going to continue to build upon the success we've already have inside the Intra Manager. And these are four items are really requested from our members, and we'll continue to build upon them. So the top one is we want to be able to upload documents into the Intra. So if you built that DRS or IS or any other technical information that you want to share with other individuals, you can upload those files or file links directly into the Intra so that it can be consumed later. The second one bullet you see there we're really excited about because right now one of the issues people have when they run an Intra is I have to collect all that data.

I've built and designed my Intra. I've told individuals to do the work, but then they have to submit that data back to me and maybe they're doing it on Excel or a piece of paper or whatever the case is.

We're going to have the ability for you as the coordinator to create a custom link for each technician. You can send that technician then that link and they can enter their own data results.

It's a mobile -friendly web page that can put from their phone if they wanted to, and it'll walk them through the process of how to enter their submission.

In addition to that, if you have uploaded any documents for that Intra, they're going to be able to view and review those as well. We're trying to close the full circle between what the coordinator can do, allowing the technician to submit that data, and then having the coordinator review the data at the end. Taking out that chance in the middle of typos or whatever the case is, making it easier.

That third bullet, you can see they can download and view those uploaded documents. And then the last part there is we'll be introducing a pass -fail report so that you'll be able to look at your intra and be able to see the historical reference for it. So if you've got the same intra and you repeat it every six months, I might want to see a report for the last two years of all of my participants on a single view to be able to see who passed and who failed.

That's another report that's going to be coming in the near future.

How do you get started? It's really, really easy. So if you're an existing NAPT customer, like I said, it will be in the portal and you'll have access to the new intra manager starting tomorrow morning. So all you need to do is go to the customer portal, sign in with your existing account, click on the intra at the top, and go ahead and order your first intra and get started.

If you're new to NAPT and you've not used us before, it's really easy to get signed up. So when you go to the customer portal, which is customers .qmsnavigator .com, or there's a large link on the top of our website, proficiency .org, there's a button there that says, no account, register now. You can go ahead and click on that, enter your information, and as soon as we approve your account, then you have the ability to get logged in and start using the Intra Manager. So that's one of the great features. We want to reduce as many barriers as we possibly can as we go through this.

Any questions, thoughts or concerns? We try to keep this at 30 minutes and I want to get through it so you could see the demo from start to finish within that 30 minutes. I did it in 20, which is exactly what I was shooting for to try to make it so that we had a little bit of time if people had questions on the tail end.

Do you have any questions, thoughts? Please feel free to use the raise hand feature or use the chat slash QA, and we can go ahead and answer those. So Jimmy asked the techs don't need to be NAPT members, absolutely not. They don't need to be, and they don't actually even need to have an account inside the portal. And that goes back to this previous slide where we talk about what's coming soon, right? Today, only you would need that ability to get access to the portal so that you could enter the technician information. Soon, obviously, the techs will be able to get that as well.

A couple other questions, you know, is there a recording for this? Absolutely, we're recording this right now, so once it's done and we take out any places where I goofed up along the way, not just kidding, we'll go ahead and publish that so that you have that information. And we'll also publish the presentation as well so that you all have access to this PowerPoint. So if you need to share it with anyone in your organization, you can do that. And any. An Intra is a PT with NAPT only now when we talk about Intra, we're talking about a ILC that you've designed for your organization.

Maybe NAPT doesn't have a particular test or a PT within your discipline or within your scope. So you need to build your own so that you can do that testing with your own individuals. So you absolutely don't need anything from NAPT because ultimately in this case, we're not shipping you. NAPT isn't shipping you anything to test with. You're using the equipment you have at your organization to be able to go ahead and do that.

Can this be done inside the organization or with multiple organizations?

Roger, there's nothing that prevents you from doing this outside of your organization because ultimately you're just entering in the participants and participant data. So you kind of have that flexibility from that perspective.

Other training on ISO 1743. We don't have anything right now scheduled, but that's a great idea, Jeffrey. We're looking at some other webinars as well for into the new year. So if you've got other areas that you think would be helpful to have a quick 30 minute conversation about something inside of, you know, this world, feel free to just go ahead and reach out to me or. To the office and we can get that scheduled and add it to the list. Any other questions?

Thanks Rod. Yeah, absolutely. We've got we have the PT plan portion that when we definitely have listed as a as an upcoming webinar feature.

So look look forward to that one for sure.

All right, any other questions? All right, well, it's 1225 and I promised only to take 30 minutes of your time. So we kept it pretty tight. If you do have questions, you're wondering about the Intra Manager or anything else associated with NAPT, you can always email us at napt at proficiency .org and we'll go ahead and get that information to you and we'll reply back. So again, the new Intra Manager will be available to everyone tomorrow morning.

So feel free to log into your customer portal, see what that looks like and give us feedback as we continue to build this tool.

Ultimately, we're building this for you as organizations to make your life easier. So as you come across different ideas, things that would make it better, feel free to share it with us and we definitely are always listening.

So thank you everyone. Have a great rest of your day and we will talk soon.

Thanks all.

NAPT Intra Manager: Manage Your Proficiency Testing Program Online