According to the international ISA-95 standard, production processes and output must be subjected to quality tests. In addition to ensuring that the correct resources (equipment, materials and personnel) are used, quality tests check that products conform to quality standards and can be released (within specified conditions).
In at-line tests, items or samples are taken out of the production stream and an operator at the production line performs the inspection and fills in forms with results of the analysis.
The at-line tests require only seconds or minutes to be conducted, so it is important the production process is not interrupted. The quality tests are designed to inspect/analyze certain properties (Parameters) of the material being produced at specific time intervals.
The way to do it, it is through configuration of Work instructions. It is an electronic form or a checklist that contains a number of tests/actions an operator must perform on a sample within a certain time frame.
Typically some module of the MES solution is displaying the form at run-time to the production operators so they can execute quality tests effortlessly at the right time.