Quality grows “in Stature” for innovative electronics components leader Molex

Manufacturers with design and manufacturing facilities around the globe must ensure enterprisewide uniformity of practices. Now there are several ways to do that.

For Molex —a Lisle-Ill.-based global supplier of electronic components tasked with maintaining consistency within its product development process—it involves Dyadem’s FMEA-Pro7 (failure mode and effects analysis) software to support product engineering, manufacturing, and quality across multiple languages.

Dyadem’s Stature—a Web-enabled, enterprisewide quality life-cycle management solution—was designed with input from multinational manufacturers in the automotive, semiconductor, consumer products, and medical device sectors. Stature addresses the four pillars of Quality Life-cycle Management: Quality Specifications, Action Management, Quality Management, and Knowledge-Base Management.

While Molex stresses innovation, that’s just the beginning. “The products we offer in each worldwide market are similar, so we need to ensure that risk analysis and design processes are equally consistent,” says Molex CIO Gary J. Matula. “We want any design team or customer to have access to the same knowledge base, and see the same design and risk documentation, whether they’re reading in English or Chinese.”

Toward that end, Molex tapped Dyadem to create custom templates—reproduced in multiple languages—for design and manufacturing processes. The result for Molex is a library of templates for any process, presented in the language of choice, Matula says.

That library now allows Molex to further leverage group knowledge and expertise.

“As our development groups become more globalized, our designs can be started in one country and finished in another,” Matula says. “It’s about building on the experience of our global engineering team.”

Such efforts to enforce uniformity throughout design and manufacturing across the organization are also about improving quality—a competitive differentiator. Yet it remains a difficult obstacle to tackle.

“High quality relies directly on making a product in conformance to design specifications, which is directly linked to product design and engineering, manufacturing engineering, assembly, test, and customer management,” says Simon Jacobson, a senior analyst with Boston AMR Research . “Despite this, many manufacturers continue to treat manufacturing quality apart from their core business processes, making it difficult to achieve real-time visibility into manufacturing costs and product performance actuals.”

“The biggest flaw with looking at quality from a PLM perspective is it focuses on the manufacturing stage—but manufacturing is too late in the game.”

—Kevin North, CEO, Dyadem

Kevin North, president and CEO of Dyadem, points out that while the cost of poor quality can be as much as 15 percent to 30 percent of revenues for a global manufacturer, the quality processes around getting a product to market have never been fully addressed in product life-cycle management (PLM). In highly competitive industries and global supply chains, it is imperative to address quality from the design stage forward, he says.

“The biggest flaw with looking at quality from a PLM perspective is it focuses on the manufacturing stage—but manufacturing is too late in the game,” North says. “Taking that approach forces manufacturers to adopt a ‘find-and-fix’ mentality that is slow and [expensive] because flaws are caught late in the product life cycle, where it’s costly to resolve.”

Last summer, Dyadem introduced its Stature enterprise quality life-cycle management solution to reduce the cost of poor quality and proactively improve design, manufacture, and delivery of high-value products and processes.

Fundamentally, Stature focuses on a product’s “bill of compliance” to establish a common vocabulary for requirements, functions, and failures. The solution holds appeal for Matula, who thinks implementing Stature is the next step in building a shared and secure global knowledge database that will improve product development at Molex.

“Even with FMEA-Pro 7, our global growth model requires a system that works as a true database,” says Matula. “Securing our multinational pool of intellectual capital can be cumbersome. We intend to integrate Stature with our PLM system—and the rest of our product data—to create a seamless knowledge base for our users and design teams.”

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