Quality and compliance for the hi-tech industry

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In the old, pre-wired economy businesses moved more slowly and quality assurance meant running a few tests on finished products before shipping. Quality initiatives for the supply chain tended to be focused internally with little emphasis on collaboration or customer satisfaction. Organizational ideology was cued towards a reactive, rather than a proactive approach to quality initiatives. In today's economy, hardware manufacturers face a dual challenge of shrinking product cycles and faster time-to-market requirements. Moreover, rapid globalization and increased service competitiveness has firmly put the focus on efficiency and quality improvement in products and processes. High Tech firms that invested in enterprise software to manage inventory, financials and orders are now adopting solutions to reduce part defect rates and maintain supplier relationships.

Quality has become a strategic priority for companies hoping to thrive in the new, connected economy. Quality initiatives are undertaken to help organizations meet business objectives and financial goals. Today, one of the most important success factors in High Tech businesses is time-to-market. This has resulted in compressed product development cycles and immense pressure for organizations to get their products to market, while leaving them little room for error. Organizations that clearly define their quality approach and adhere to the management principle of highest product quality combined with the best customer service are the ones that will capitalize on markets, competition and customers.

Shrinking product lifecycles and faster time-to-market requirements
The High Tech industry faces dynamic challenges with shrinking product life cycles, and demands for constant product innovation. Most products are mass customized and the rapidly depreciating inventories along with misalignment in supply/demand have added to the woes of the industry. In any enterprise plan, quality is central to the process and in getting products out to market, a high tech enterprise plan requires an effective global quality and compliance management system to manage the entire spectrum of activities towards final delivery. An effective system must manage quality and compliance through a two pronged approach, across the extended value chain and from an internal corrective and issue resolution perspective. The implementation of an enterprise-class quality management system must specifically forge better understanding between customers and vendors across the extended enterprise.

Addressing the Challenge
MetricStream's platform and applications help hardware manufacturers achieve high growth in the face of dual challenges of shrinking product cycles and faster time-to-market requirements. MetricStream's solutions are ideally suited to address quality and compliance issues in multi-site manufacturing, contract manufacturing, and assembly services within the High Tech industry. Its tightly integrated web-based application suite drives continuous improvement through the enterprise and establishes closed loop control of quality processes. MetricStream understands how an effective web-based quality and compliance management solution can provide High Tech enterprises with an efficient system that helps optimize the design and development of new products by identifying and measuring progress, and allowing modifications at specific intervals/all times, while increasing operations efficiency and managing assurance across the supply chain.

MetricStream's web based, fully integrated Enterprise Quality and Compliance Management suite provides High Tech manufacturers -

• The ability to track supplier performance parameters including response times, inspection histories and preventive action reviews for improved price negotiations
• The ability to measure costs of quality, measure parameters that relate to suppliers and increase its visibility to end customers
• Real-time reporting of problems combined with flexible workflows to ensure quick time to resolution
• Review of supplier materials, and in-process and finished goods to ensure conformance to specifications and standards
• Conducting internal audits or 3rd party supplier audits to reduce material defects and enable trend analyses on audit history

At an enterprise-wide level, MetricStream Solution allows each department to communicate information that can be reviewed periodically with real-time visibility to management through powerful reporting and dashboard features. The application allows for testing and verification of the product at each design stage, thereby ensuring continued compliance with the design specifications. Customer-focused organizations can internally enhance the design, development, production, testing and installation processes, and in accordance with ISO regulations set and maintain various control/test procedures at all stages of product design. By providing employees with the best tools, setting up systemized quality procedures and continual improvement, the MetricStream solution results in a reduction in failures and nonconformance, reduced costs, increased revenue and improved customer satisfaction.

Achieving enterprise-wide quality and standards compliance: The MetricStream Advantage

MetricStream provides the first truly unified Enterprise Quality and Compliance Management System for regulated consumer industries. MetricStream's suite of applications for the high tech industry include NCM, CAPA, Audit and Inspection modules, which are built on MetricStream's Java-based Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) event driven and analytic platform and provide capabilities that cover -

• EPMTM platform that provides real-time reporting of problems, scheduling, rule based alerting and notification, and integration features that perfectly matches the needs of the High Tech industry
• Flexible workflow based web application that contains embedded best business practices and domain knowledge and ISO 9000 compliant
• The infrastructure to report and manage problem recording, root cause investigation and resolution, with measurable ex-post metrics
• The ability to track supplier performance parameters including response times, inspection histories and preventive action reviews to facilitate Supplier Improvement initiatives
• Advanced analytics, reporting and dashboard functionality to provide high level process visibility and actionable real time information

MetricStream Value Proposition
MetricStream's quality and compliance management solutions help high tech enterprises benefit significantly through the use of software solutions that enable regulatory compliance and increase operational efficiency. Our solutions can help power organizations reduce their administrative and operating costs, achieve business objectives, competitive advantage and increased market share

• Significant reduction in production downtime and scrap
• Increased revenues through shortened time-to-market for new products
• Reduced Cost of Poor Quality (COPQ)
• Reduced product recall/warranty costs
• Realize ROI in 3 months through tangible operational cost savings, improved yields and significantly reduced COPQ

MetricStream's seamlessly integrated suite of web-based products, facilitate enterprise-wide deployment and assist customers throughout all phases of installation and deployment. It has an intuitive, easy-to-use user interface, n-tier architecture and compliant with J2EE and XML. The application runs on Windows NT, Solaris and Linux and its open architecture tightly integrates with organizational Legacy systems, ERP and other third party applications.