Enhancing Quality and Compliance Processes With a Global, Unified System

BUSINESS CHALLENGES

As a global company with operations in the U.K. and U.S., Filtronic struggled with an internally developed product development tool. Tracking, maintaining, and releasing products was slow and inefficient. Filtronic had design, manufacturing, and quality silos that made it difficult for teams to see the interconnectedness of products, procedures, and documents. Managing compliance, audit actions, and corrective actions required cumbersome manual processes and constant human intervention. In Filtronic’s fast-paced development environment, there was zero tolerance for engineering design roadblocks, part issues, or regulatory compliance delays.

In addition to solving these challenges, Filtronic wanted to focus on what they do best by eliminating their reliance on internal IT and engineering resources that were required to keep their homegrown tool afloat.

RESULTS

Arena has been an integral part of Filtronic’s business systems for many years and is used throughout the company. “With Arena, Filtronic can pull all the design, manufacturing, and quality information into a single, unified product record,” said Rushton.

After adopting Arena PLM, Filtronic’s teams were able to easily track requirements, revisions, quality, and compliance. This provided complete visibility of their critical product and quality processes. Arena simplified issue tracking with related corrective actions which reduced time to resolution by 50% and increased customer satisfaction. “Our customers expect high-quality parts and quick responses, and Arena allows us to immediately take action on any issue with a part, which sustains that reputation,” noted Rushton.

Design, engineering, and production teams collaborate to improve quality and compliance processes

With Filtronic’s highly technical work, communication platforms are critical for quality. The improved data integrity and accuracy from controlling information in Arena helps Filtronic achieve substantial time savings. Additional time savings are realized because teams from any location can now access the right information easily and speed review and approvals for engineering changes—which are linked directly to the affected components, subassemblies, and documents in a multilevel bill of materials (BOM). This BOM is the heart of the product record and the best way to see the entire product design from top to bottom while enabling reuse of components and avoiding the creation and release of duplicate components. “With enhanced global collaboration and improved engineering change management processes, it now takes us about half the time to implement an engineering change,” stated Rushton.

In addition, when the pandemic hit, Arena enabled Filtronic’s teams to continue to work effectively from remote locations to keep their product development and launch processes on schedule.

Finally, with the complete product record managed in one system, Arena can link quality records directly to the affected component or assembly to provide added visibility and control. This product-centric approach simplifies quality issue resolution and regulatory compliance enabling Filtronic to create a solid, connected framework for all quality activities. “One of the biggest benefits is the interconnectedness of the Arena system,” said Rushton. “A process audit can connect to associated procedures, documents, and a resulting corrective action report (CAR), so our teams get increased traceability and can easily click from one record to another. This saves our teams significant time during audit preparation and reduces the potential for human error because team members don’t have to rely solely on their memory or search for disconnected and related documents.”