CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
2 June 2004
Implementation Investments
Manufacturers Stand Behind Agile to Improve Product Quality and Achieve Profitable Revenue Growth
Agile Software Corporation ( http://www.agile.com ) announced several successful customer implementations of Agile Product Service & Improvement (PS&I), which has enabled improved product quality and customer satisfaction. Agile PS&I integrates customer, product, quality and regulatory information within a closed-loop corrective action system. Innovative companies spanning multiple countries-Fargo Electronics in the U.S., Advantech and ADlink in Taiwan and Hitachi in Japan-are now able to fulfill customer demands for higher quality, faster response and compliance with regulatory requirements.
Hitachi
Over a year ago, the Information & Telecommunications Systems business unit of Hitachi, Ltd., a global electronics company, extended the length of its product warranty of its personal computers from one year to three years. This change brought about the need to improve supporting processes to keep the warranty costs down and shorten customer response time. Meeting these goals would require visibility into the product record and better collaboration between engineering, manufacturing and sales. Hitachi selected Agile PS&I to help make this happen. Following the implementation, the engineering team is now able to respond more quickly to customer issues and the support team has access to product details that strengthen its ability to trouble shoot.
"With Agile PS&I, we have accelerated the process of product improvement by understanding what our customers need, communicating it to each team and tying that information to the product record," said Koichi Kunimasa, chief innovation officer, Information & Telecommunications Systems, Hitachi, Ltd. "We increased our warranty because we believe in our technology and in our ability to serve our customers-Agile makes this much easier."
Fargo
Fargo Electronics, Inc., a manufacturer of personal identification card printing systems, looked to Agile to improve the performance of Fargo's quality management system. Three months following the implementation of Agile Product Service & Improvement, quality issues records are now housed in a single, accessible repository from which metrics can be measured, issues can be escalated, and customer needs can be addressed quickly and comprehensively.
"Our quality systems were difficult to manage, and most importantly-not meeting the needs of our customers," said Tom Platner, vice president, engineering and manufacturing for Fargo. "Since implementing Agile PS&I, we've been able to review a comprehensive knowledge base of product quality history that helps us take what we have learned and apply it to, not only current, but also future designs."
Advantech
Advantech is a global provider of solutions that enable Internet connectivity in a wide variety of markets, offering a comprehensive set of over 450 products and solutions, including system integration hardware, software, and services. The company was looking to improve the efficiency of its quality management system, which was not a standard process. This caused slow responses to customer issues, an inability to evaluate how the issues were resolved, and no way to re-use the solutions. Advantech chose Agile PS&I and has already experienced significant time and cost savings.
"Our customers hold us to very high expectations and our Agile implementation helped us to meet these expectations as well as improve our business," said Eric Chen, information technology division director, Advantech. "We have experienced a 25% decrease in cycle time, a decrease in warranty costs and an increase in customer satisfaction."
ADlink
Headquartered in Taiwan, with design and technology centers in the US and the Pacific Rim regions, ADlink is a global provider of communications, embedded computing, test & measurement, and automated solutions. When the company developed new products, there was no central database or record tracking product quality. Design times were much longer because teams were not able to access previous work, and therefore had to recreate each design from the beginning. A great deal of time was also spent tracking down product information that was located in various systems across the enterprise, such as the customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications.
"Agile PS&I has enabled us to raise the bar on the quality for our new product designs," said Dianne Ni, senior director, ADLink. "Better quality means happier customers and lower warranty costs-two key factors that affect our bottom line."
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