Product quality is looking up, thanks to PLM adoption
by Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 7/1/2005 12:00:00 AM
The time and cost savings that can be achieved from adopting product life-cycle management (PLM) software are well documented. Now there is growing evidence that PLM adoption can improve product quality as well.
"When you ask companies that are in the process of implementing PLM why they're doing it, a faster time-to-market is the usual answer," says Michael Burkett, a PLM director for Boston-based AMR Research. "But when you ask companies that have actually implemented PLM about its benefits, improved quality is the second most commonly cited benefit," (see graphic).
"It's difficult to quantify the precise financial benefit of getting to market sooner: it's a strategic benefit, but a soft one," Burkett adds. "Improvements in quality must be measured and quantified."
According to Ray Hein, VP of product strategy for PLM vendor Agile Software, the company's Product Service and Improvement solution achieves these improvements in two distinct ways. First, it provides a means of capturing and integrating product-related quality data from across the value chain—reports from field service technicians, suppliers, customers, and the factory floor. Second, it allows prioritizing and driving improvement projects by analyzing the data and then integrating it with analyses of other previously identified faults, and the corrective actions that were taken to remedy them.
By turning seemingly disparate data into a searchable knowledge base, says Hein, companies can not only identify and fix faults more quickly, but also boost engineering productivity. "There's a lot of intellectual property that can be reused and leveraged if companies only had the means to do it," he says.
"Initially, we saw the Agile package as a document control system for parts and bills of material," says Earl Wiggins, VP of customer and quality engineering at Quantum Corp., a manufacturer of data storage systems based in Colorado Springs. "But then we realized we could use it to make reports from the field available to the design team, and capture and analyze quality information from vendors. We can identify quality issues and initiate corrective action much earlier."
