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by Beth Stackpole, Contributing Editor Posted on Friday, November 03, 2006 3:10:08 PM   | Abstract: | By integrating service and support data into its product system of record, Instron gains a boost in quality and greatly improves customer service. |
Instron Corp. specializes in equipment that helps manufacturers test the quality and endurance of their systems and materials. So it wasn't that much of a stretch for the $200 million manufacturer to take on a testing role of its own: pushing product lifecycle management (PLM) to the next level by integrating service and support data to close the loop on all aspects of development, from product inception through retirement. With a manufacturing plant in England and another in Canton, MA, Instron (Norwood, MA) originally looked toward the collaboration aspect of PLM as a way to gain efficiencies and provide better visibility to engineering groups located across the globe. But as its development team began to reap the rewards of having a single repository for all product-related information, Instron quickly became hungry for a solution that would leverage the same system to attack its quality management issues and help with servicing products in the field -- and, again, do so on a global basis. EXPANDING THE PLM PLATFORM
Enter Agile Corp. (San Jose, CA), which has been Instron's provider of the collaboration and product data management (PDM) portions of PLM since 1999. After an impromptu demonstration of Agile's new product service and improvement (PS&I) component, which links design problems and corrective actions associated with parts and products already in the field to engineering changes, Instron's head of quality management jumped on the idea of expanding the Agile PLM platform with the PS&I component. [Click to continue] |