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Quality Lifecycle Management Goes Enterprise

by Chris Chiappinelli, MA Editorial Staff

Posted on Thursday, June 21, 2007 6:02:00 PM       Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox                               

With the debut of its Stature product, quality management software provider Dyadem International Ltd. is giving manufacturers a new enterprise-level tool for ensuring the quality of their products and manufacturing processes.

The Stature application works in conjunction with Dyadem's existing applications for managing product and process quality throughout their lifecycles, including the company's core FMEA Pro program, the backbone of which is the half-century-old failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) methodology for product and process risk analysis. This codified system aims to identify potential product failure and defects at both the design and manufacturing stages, thereby avoiding hazardous situations for end customers and manufacturing operations personnel alike.

The FMEA process involves a manufacturer's design teams as well as its manufacturing personnel, and is in use at NASA, Cisco, Intel, and hundreds of other companies, said Kevin North, president and CEO of Dyadem.

"You can't find a company that manufactures anything with any degree of complexity that doesn't do FMEA both at the design and the process side of the business," North told Managing Automation in an interview.

FMEA Pro's capabilities include industry-standard risk ranking; recommendation management; pre-loaded and customer-create knowledge libraries; reporting features; and administrative record keeping.

Although the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies have adopted Dyadem technology, it remained a desktop application for more than a decade. The release of Stature, which in most instances will be deployed on premises and accessed via a Web interface by employees and partners across a company's supply chain, underscores the vendor's push to treat product and process risk mitigation as an enterprise-wide, collaborative process.

Alison Smith, senior research analyst at AMR Research, likens Dyadem's technology approach to a "bill of compliance," something that has not seen wide adoption in manufacturing, but should, she told Managing Automation.

"Nobody has looked at quality as a lifecycle process. It's been very disconnected," she explained. Various software applications, including PLM and ERP, own pieces of the product risk management process, but there is no system of record, "and that's why it's a mess," Smith concluded.

"We've been a desktop risk management software company for most of our history," North said, "and what we wanted to do was get into larger-footprint installs, bigger implementations, and utilize some of the project management elements of the methodologies ... to get into different departments that were non-traditional for us." Those include procurement and other functions central to the supply chain.

From its roots as a risk management software provider to the chemicals and oil and gas industries in the 1990s, Dyadem extended its focus five years ago to new verticals. The company used its knowledge of key risk management methods, such as FMEA and fault-tree analysis (FTA) — FTA Pro is another of its products — as a basis for this expansion, creating applications tailored to high tech and electronics, aerospace and defense, automotive, and general manufacturing companies.

North characterized Dyadem's vertical strategy as very targeted, saying the company did not want to "fight 100 battles," preferring to limit the number of new industrial segments it entered.

As a pioneer in approaching quality management as an end-to-end process, Dyadem does not have many competitors, Smith said. Some, such as Sparta, EtQ, Inc., and Pilgrim Software, tackle one or more elements of product risk management, but Dyadem so far has cornered the market on the lifecycle approach. "They've got the potential to affect a sea change in the way industry thinks about this stuff," she said.

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