Scaling Quality Through Integration
Full Transcript Below:
William VanBuskirk
I’m excited to be here. Thanks for coming. We’re going to chat through PLM-MES integration. Before we jump in, just some quick intros. So, my name’s William. I lead our U.S. alliances with Tulip.
Chris Brickner
My name is Chris Brickner. I am the Director of Quality Assurance and Regulatory Compliance at Echodyne.
Marshall Wood
I’m Marshall Wood, my title at PTC Arena is Senior Customer Success Coach, so it’s kind of a post-sales role, where I help users of Arena to get the most out of the system. Whether it’s best practices, or teaching them new modules, new features, advocating for them internally. So a whole host of post-sales sort of roles.
William VanBuskirk
Perfect. Thank you. So, gentlemen, I’m curious. Why this topic? I mean, we’re at a manufacturing conference. We’re talking about engineering. We’re talking about PLM. What’s the, why do this, before we get into the how, and then the what, and the tactical. Why is it important for PLM and MES to be on the same page?
Chris Brickner
Yeah. So, we’ve just recently implemented Tulip in our manufacturing area. Primarily we wanted to get off a paper-based and file system-based system that stores data, and primarily our electronic device history record. It wasn’t secure, people could make changes, and it just wasn’t something that we wanted. So we wanted to quickly get off of that, implement Tulip, and have a clear process for our build process that would populate our DHR automatically, and implement some control points along the manufacturing assembly side.
We also wanted to maintain our PLM system and use our PLM system as our documented records. So we pull in our SOPs, and our work instructions, so that the operators have it right up in front of them, and they go step by step in the assembly process.
Marshall Wood
Yeah. It’s all about that single source of truth. You want to have one place to go to, with one version of that bill of materials, and those files that describe your engineering efforts. I had a chance to catch the tail end of the previous session, and one of the guys on the panel said something about having the same data within the same document listed multiple times. And if you get an update to that and you correct it in five of six places, you’re already at risk, right there, right? So to have one place where you go to get the definitive answer for your product record is just integral.
William VanBuskirk
So everyone says single source for truth, but it’s really, it’s just that. Single source of truth for engineering, for documentation, for eDHR, a clear single source of truth for manufacturing execution. One thing I’d love, Chris, for you to touch on is, look, this is hard for anyone. Any industry, but especially aerospace and defense. I mean, AS9100 regulation is no joke.
Chris Brickner
Right.
William VanBuskirk
Walk us through the additional complexity, because this is a complex, engineered, aerospace product.
Chris Brickner
Yeah. So we have a lot of standards we have to meet. But how we do that is up to us, and we can employ control points that ensures that we’re providing the best quality product in everything from receiving inspection, all the way through manufacturing, and out the door. Yes, we do follow the regulations within AS9100, but it’s also the right thing to do. Because our customers demand it, and we want to provide that for them.
William VanBuskirk
Perfect. I love how you said that. This isn’t just a necessary evil of, “Hey, we got to do it to be compliant,” but this is just necessary for scale in your production.
Chris Brickner
I mean, you can look at it like we’re… And that’s kind of the messaging. When I started it at Echodyne, I developed our QMS, and I was kind of evangelizing across the organization that had never been around a QMS before.
So they were, “What’s the benefit to me,” kind of thing. And as soon as we kind of ingrained that culture of quality within the organization that, “We’re doing right by our customers, because we’re technically saving lives, out there. And they depend on that.” So it’s not a real, once you have that perspective, you want to do your best job every day.
William VanBuskirk
Absolutely. Absolutely. Clear purpose. I love it. Zooming out, Marshall, I’m curious, beyond some of these specific Echodyne examples, just in general. I mean, what are some common friction points between PLM, MES? And what kind of use cases do you usually use to address those?
Marshall Wood
Yeah. Well, I mean, the kind of classic example of those kind of friction points or inefficiencies is, again, getting back to the single source of truth, I’m kind of beating that home here. But if you imagine, a manufacturing tech sits down to put something together, and they start from the get-go with the wrong documentation, right?
So having that connectedness back to the single source of truth is just so important. And then imagine also, maybe you get the right data, but you don’t realize that, “Oh, the guy that worked the previous shift found something without a spec.” Something was nonconforming and already reported it, and it’s in some system somewhere.
But if you don’t have, if you’re not clued into that kind of information, then again, you’re starting right off on the wrong foot, and the result of that is going to be rework, or worse, scrap. So.
William VanBuskirk
So you mentioned one element, rework, scrap, there’s a quality constraint. What about other value levers? I’m thinking of, one angle I’ll toss out, curious what you guys think. Is like, if you can shorten the feedback loop to go through one design-build iteration from two months to a month, I mean, that’s twice as many at bats you have a year to build the right product.
Marshall Wood
Yeah, that’s absolutely true. I mean, before this kind of thought of having this sort of feedback, PLM was very much of a point in time. You get your engineers doing their work in their CAD environments, they’re sending that data into PLM where it’s getting approved and checked and so forth, and then onto ERP, and maybe onto the shop floor.
But now it’s not just that, right? It’s that feedback path that allows you to bring that information back in front of the people who can correct it. In the case of a nonconformance, absolutely.
William VanBuskirk
Perfect.
Chris Brickner
We also really like that the information is right at the fingertips of our operators, and they don’t have to worry that their document that they’re looking at is the latest version. Because they know it is, that’s what’s presented to them. And any changes initially gets changed in Arena, goes through the approval process, review process, and ultimately, presented back to the operator.
William VanBuskirk
Clear feedback loop. Operator engagement. It’s interesting you think, “Hey, manufacturing’s the only thing you need to engage the operator,” but it’s really anything that touches the part. I love that. Well, Chris, I’m curious. Look, you’ve had a history with QMS systems.
Chris Brickner
Yeah.
William VanBuskirk
PLM. I mean, look, Arena is a cloud-native software. Tulip is a cloud-native platform. How does that change the game for you, in terms of the ability to iterate, in terms of fine-tuning and configuring these platforms?
Chris Brickner
Yeah. I’ve been emailing our IT systems director and asking what… Because we’re so new to Tulip, we’re still finding out how we can use it, and implementing AI tools is kind of the next thing. And so I’m emailing him back and forth and, “What do we have licenses for?” Because we’re cloud based, that’s a bit of a restraint, but if you set up the open systems, and they’re all in the GovCloud, or whatever system that you feel appropriate for your products, it seems very seamless.
I’m really excited about the opportunities that lay ahead, and we really want to drive efficiency in our manufacturing process, and try to turn the tide of some NCRs that we’re seeing, and really become more efficient in our products.
William VanBuskirk
Perfect. I like that. So we talked about process, we talked about eDHR process, capturing the device history records correctly with Tulip and Arena. We talked about the tech. We talked about the need for an open architecture, rest APIs, connecting with your team, being able to configure and fine-tune the tool how you need it.
One final topic would be people. It seems like, look, you can have awesome APIs, you can have, awesome streaming architecture agents, and whatever’s beyond agents. But it seems like, at the end of the day, you cannot forget about making sure the design engineer walks over down the hall, talks to a process engineer, the two of them walk out to the shop floor and talk to supervisor and say, “Hey, let’s make sure we’re on the same page.”
Marshall Wood
Yeah.
William VanBuskirk
Like, how do you make sure it’s not just a, “Hey, tech problem, let’s make sure the APIs are rocking and rolling.” But like, fundamentally, people need to talk to people…
Chris Brickner
Yep.
William VanBuskirk
…to solve problems.
Chris Brickner
Yeah, and it’s really all in your DFX process. Design for manufacturing is a very key part of what we do, and we started doing that about a year ago, and it’s really proved beneficial, so that we don’t run into any surprises in the manufacturing area. Everything’s been vetted, and thought through, and collaborated with our engineers, our manufacturing engineers. And you talk about validating, and validating changes. All that is very vital to that process.
William VanBuskirk
I like that, because I think sometimes we can think DFX or, design for assembly, design for production, design for, really anything, we think it’s a, “Hey, have the right SOP, have the right tools, call it a day.” But I liked how you mentioned, it’s people executing those processes with the right collaborative culture. So that’s …
Marshall Wood
And you’ve got to get that, in today’s really geographically distributed kind of environments, you’ve really got to consider that it might not be possible for that person to walk over and say, “How’s it going?”
William VanBuskirk
That’s a good point. Have your Teams call.
Marshall Wood
So to have that stuff show up in somebody’s inbox, right on somebody’s, in a tool that they’re comfortable using, right? Not some tool that they use only in these special occasions, but the familiar entrapments of PLM, or MES, or ERP, or whatever. Get that stuff right in front of them, and that’s what these kind of connections integrations allow you to do.
Chris Brickner
Yeah. And it looks like Tulip and Arena really make that communication process happen early in the project. Because you don’t want to find out, after you’ve gone through a whole bunch of engineering, that it’s not possible based on certain configurations that you’ve already implemented. And you want to really vet that out before you are ready to go, move to manufacturing.
William VanBuskirk
Got to identify those problems early.
Chris Brickner
Makes sense.
Marshall Wood
Always.
William VanBuskirk
Always, that’s the system V curve, right? Get those things sorted out early.
Marshall Wood
Yeah.
William VanBuskirk
I know we didn’t have this written down, but I was just thinking, at the conference there’s been a big push on agents, on AI native agents, in Tulip and other systems. I know we’ve talked a lot about how Tulip, Tulip agents, they can obviously make use of connectors. One of those connectors is PTC Arena. So that, that got me thinking, hey, down, down the road, what is kind of a quality manager, Tulip agent, with access to all of the Arena content? What does that look like, and what does that deliver for Echodyne?
Chris Brickner
Yeah. So we implemented Tulip to shore up some processes and do no harm in the process. But now that we’ve gone through the implementation processes, and it’s starting to really work for us now, we want to integrate a lot more quality tools within Tulip.
And provide, right now our receiving inspection is, we built some kind of AI tools around it, and we really want to get those things into Tulip so that it’s a single source. Instead of going to outside, in the file systems. And then look at how we can integrate our nonconforming operations and our nonconformance records, and CAPA processes, using our PLM system. Which is our quality system too, and use Tulip to pull that information in from Arena. So we have a lot of things we are really excited about implementing, so there’s a lot of stuff we want to do.
Marshall Wood
Right. Yeah, I would imagine having an agent within Arena, and an agent, an agent within Tulip, and they’re sharing information. And an operator in either system can say, “What’s the current state of this product? Are there open change orders? Are there open quality records? Are there open change requests, et cetera, against this thing?” And know, again, right in their own environment, they can see this response is based on data from a system that they might not have any idea how to use, or get into.
Chris Brickner
Automating our final inspection is a big, time-consuming savings. So that’s something we want to do right away.
William VanBuskirk
I like that. And Marshall, I like that point that it’s not necessarily just an agent in Tulip asking questions about PLM data, but it could also be an agent in the PLM …
Marshall Wood
Yes.
William VanBuskirk
… in Arena saying, “Hey, I’m the engineering agent. How do I make better parts? What can I learn from the shop floor …”
Marshall Wood
Exactly.
William VanBuskirk
… and iterate on design?”
Marshall Wood
“Leverage that data that was entered in that feedback loop, from the shop floor back into …” Yeah, fantastic.
William VanBuskirk
There’s no DFX without a feedback loop. You got to have the full circle.
Chris Brickner
Yep.
William VanBuskirk
You can’t just push stuff to manufacturing, or push stuff back to the …
Chris Brickner
Say goodbye to it.
William VanBuskirk
… engineers. This is helpful. Okay. So we’ve covered a couple of value props. I want to make sure we’ve covered them all, though. I’ll recap a couple and then, let’s throw in a few others. We talked a little bit about, look, obviously the biggest one is, you track your defects better, you get more holistic view of your NCRs and your root cause.
You can mitigate a lot of scrap, mitigate a lot of rework with a tighter PLM to MES integration. There’s also the, somewhat more qualitative, iterative design. Hey, I can go from an engineer has an idea, updates the drawing, now it’s in production.
If I can have that, I have twice as many design iterations for a rapidly drawing product. What other kinds of value props, if you’re talking to a VP of finance, a CFO. And when they say, “Hey, how much is this worth? How much is this integrated system, this cohesion between PLM and MES, how much is this worth?” What other levers would you all pull on?
Chris Brickner
Yeah. We are very much a growing company. We’ve kind of moved away from a startup, but now we’re in the growth phase, and we’re looking for efficiency. That’s a primary problem we want to solve, and get as efficient as possible.
We also get a lot of suggested features or improvements to our existing radar systems from our customers. And we want to be able to feed that into, it kind of goes through our sales team and it feeds us into engineering, and then likewise to manufacturing. But those are some of the things that we want to do very soon, with the value stream.
William VanBuskirk
I like that. Production efficiency. There’s also a broader DFX loop that is enabling eventually not just manufacturer to engineer, but, customer back to manufacturing, back to engineering. Where did the field error occur? Was it in manufacturing, or is it a design flaw?
Chris Brickner
Yeah.
Marshall Wood
And then also you’ve got, as we’ve both said a couple of times, right? You’re keeping people in one environment. I remember the first time I had, an engineering environment had exposure to Oracle. Or, insert your favorite ERP system. And you got training in it, you looked at it a little bit, and then you found out, “Oh, these seats are too expensive.”
Right? “We can’t give you everybody an ERP seat,” so you’re stuck in what you have today. And now, you’re not stuck, really. You’re getting this communication between these systems, and you’re leveraging that data, but you don’t necessarily have to buy a seat for every engineer to have ERP.
And the same thing kind of follows here, right? Those PLM users can work in PLM, MES can work in MES, and so forth. This is another benefit, to begin there, financially.
William VanBuskirk
Keep your native tool, keep your native interface.
Marshall Wood
Yeah.
William VanBuskirk
You’re a supervisor, you’re an operator, stay in Tulip. You’re an engineer, stay in Arena, but get access to the right data.
Marshall Wood
Exactly.
William VanBuskirk
You don’t have to swivel chair between two interfaces all day. Okay. Well, we’ve got about five or so minutes left. I want to open it up to Q&A, and, yeah, whether it’s about Echodyne or broader PLM-MES integrations.
Marshall Wood
Back in the corner.
William VanBuskirk
One in the back?
Audience Member 1
I’m just curious about your journey on getting that approved to run on the Cloud, and the GovCloud. Was there any hurdles or, what did you have to go through, to get that accepted?
Chris Brickner
No. I think our leadership team knew the benefits and requirements from our customers, that would require us to have a secure environment. And so, getting into the Cloud was, was kind of a no-brainer. It’s something we needed to do. And really, it is customer driven, but it’s a good benefit to have on your AS9100 journey. That’s something that the auditing bodies know that you take seriously, is security in your data.
Audience Member 2
Yeah, one question. Can you give some examples which data you pass from the PLM to your Tulip, from frontline?
Chris Brickner
Yeah. Well, right now, it’s primarily our documents, our SOPs, and work instructions that live in Arena. And then, we want to be able to integrate training records, that now live in Arena, and port those over to Tulip, so that we can ensure that using controls that our assemblers are trained to what they’re doing.
And that can be all automated. So we’ve got a long way to go, but it’s a clean slate right now, so.
Audience Member 3
You mentioned the customer, kind of driven a lot of this, right? I’m curious, what data you might have made available to them? Or is there certain, from a regulatory perspective, is there anything that you need to provide back to them either from the PLM or MES, that you’re providing?
Chris Brickner
Well, certainly, if there’s any issues that they’re having with our products, although we do have a less than 1% field failure rate, so. But anything that, if there’s something that we notice with a part that we needed to notify customers that have our fielded product, we would use the data from Tulip in our DHR so we can tell which unit serial number is affected.
And if our customers are affected, we can notify them right away. We’ve not had to do that, but it is in our processes. But if our customers are, are driving improvements, we do keep them up to date on the progress of that, and when they might see it in the market. We have a lot of customer partners that work with us in testing some of our engineering units, and give us feedback that way, too.
Audience Member 4
Are any of the products that you’re building with Tulip now defense or military related? And if so, is that any extra …
Chris Brickner
Yeah, we are in the counter-UAS space. So we have some customers that are using our radar systems to solve their problems. So yeah, there’s a few applications that our customers use that are in the military areas.
William VanBuskirk
One final closing question. You’re on a journey, you’re accelerating, you’ve got PLM, QMS, MES, via Tulip, on the Cloud. You’re rocking and rolling. Are the primes going to catch up?
Chris Brickner
The primes?
William VanBuskirk
The aerospace and defense primes, the OEMs …
Chris Brickner
Oh.
William VanBuskirk
… the larger ones.
Chris Brickner
Oh, I see.
William VanBuskirk
I mean, you’re nimbly moving fast.
Chris Brickner
Yeah.
William VanBuskirk
Is the rest of the industry going to move fast with you?
Chris Brickner
I think they’re… They have to move as fast as we are, too, so we want to meet them along the way. We don’t want to be ahead of them, we don’t want to be behind them, either. So it’s, they need our product right away, based on what’s happening around the globe right now. So that’s where a lot of our growth is coming from, but we don’t see a downturn in the need of all of our suite of products, so.
William VanBuskirk
Absolutely.
Chris Brickner
Yeah. We’re definitely growing.
William VanBuskirk
Perfect. All right. Well, thank you, everyone. Appreciate the time for the discussion.