Taking Quality to the Next Level

In today’s fiercely competitive marketplace more companies, ranging from medical device to electronics, understand the painful costs of quality failure and the brand-damaging hangover that persists long after the issue has been remediated. A recent LNS Research Quality Management Survey concluded that reducing the cost of quality was the number one objective for electronics companies (46%) while reducing non-conformances in manufacturing was the top objective for industrial equipment (35%) and medical device manufacturers (28%).

The ability to proactively monitor errors and product failures with enterprise and supply chain-wide visibility is only possible with a product lifecycle management (PLM) based holistic approach to quality.

When a PLM system contains comprehensive quality improvement processes that are directly connected to design, supply chain, new product introduction and continuation engineering processes, the entire team is able to build better products. This integration reduces supply chain oversights, employee missteps and product design errors.

A mature Quality PLM solution delivers companies of all sizes continual process improvements for high quality products and cost reduction across the value chain. It brings visibility, team collaboration and long-term tracking of quality resolutions to the core of an enterprise.

And now Arena has made Arena Quality a truly superior solution with the addition of full supplier access and participation, along with automatic status updates. Suppliers can now participate in every aspect of the quality process, as assignees, owners and creators. Quality processes can be chained together as issues are discovered which lead to escalation, to give all stakeholders the complete picture. And quality has never been easier to use with the automated setting of status based on step completion, and ability to connect items to quality processes straight from the item header.

When quality, product and project data are all visible in a single globally-accessible centralized system, collaboration, quality and design processes are streamlined and improved. By ensuring teams—which now include suppliers—are working from the latest playbook, version-control errors, scrap and rework costs are reduced.

Here’s a list of Arena Quality’s new features:

• Suppliers can now create and be included in quality processes as assignees and owners, and fully involved in any quality process shared with them, including interactive CARs and SCARs.  This is particularly key for medical device and high tech OEMs.
• Employees can control supplier access to individual quality processes and share selected affected objects for maximum security and flexibility.
• Quality processes can be connected to other quality processes, enabling easy navigation and escalation of issues.
• Process status is kept up to date automatically, as steps are completed.
• Items are more easily added to quality processes through a new intuitive “Add to Quality” button directly from the item record.

Quality Managers can now painlessly bring the entire supply chain together to solve quality issues fast with the following benefits:

• Time to Market – Employees and suppliers can better collaborate throughout the product cycle to speed time to market.
• Product Quality – Teams build better products in a culture of continuous improvement, where everyone in the supply chain can be alerted to new issues in real time, and can learn from a documented library of past challenges.
• Margins – Quality process improvements in operations, manufacturing and development reduce scrap, rework and labor to improve product margins and maximize return on investment.

A PLM-based solution connecting quality with the fundamental product development processes will deliver higher-quality products. With this holistic, single-source-responsibility, end-to-end view of quality management, Arena Quality makes their enormously popular module even more robust… again.