Instron links quality and service issues via Agile PLM

When product engineers at Instron are hard at work on a new product, or revisions of existing products, they have the software equivalent of a quality expert looking over their shoulders. That's because Instron—a Norwood, Mass.-based manufacturer of materials testing equipment—has deployed an application from Agile Software that makes quality issues actionable from within Agile's product life-cycle management (PLM) suite.

"When our engineers do a search or open an item, they see a little icon that indicates there is associated quality information," says Cameron Bickel, Instron's manager of document control. "They can click on the quality tab and drill into as much of that information as they wish."

Instron began using Agile's PLM suite in 1999, leveraging core functions for product record management. In 2003, it deployed an Agile module now called Product Service & Improvement, or PS&I, which integrates product record and quality history, and offers quality reporting and root-cause analysis capabilities.

"PS&I gives us a process to collect incidents that are happening at the customer level, and consolidate information on any common problems," says Bickel. "It then allows for corrective action. Our engineers are one click away from seeing any quality problems when working on designs."

Instron used Agile's software development kit to integrate PS&I with certain events generated by Instron's service-management system from Tesseract. Most service-order details aren't passed into PLM, says Bickel, but when quality issues can't be solved by field-service or technical-support staff, and require input from design or manufacturing engineers who use the Agile system, those issues are passed into PS&I.

This automated link between systems helps Instron more quickly respond to quality issues in the field. For Instron—which makes large pieces of equipment that require field installation—the ability to quickly resolve quality issues during product deployment is crucial. The PS&I module addresses this need much better than the previous collection of homegrown quality-management databases, says Bickel.

In fact, he says, the move to common systems for handling quality issues has helped cut receivables—a measure of the number of days it takes to receive payment—by about half.

"We've been able to take a global approach to managing quality issues, and we're able to quickly focus the right people on a given problem," Bickel says.

Over time, adds Bickel, PS&I should help improve product quality by building up a base of quality information directly visible to engineers.