A leading supplier of wafer fabrication equipment and services for the semiconductor industry sought to streamline and centralize their quality management system and integrate it with other business systems. The company had several disparate, homegrown systems that were not providing a comprehensive view into their overall quality and quality processes. Additionally, they wanted to improve the critical customer impact closure rate and achieve warranty spend goals.

They looked for a solution that would automate their corrective action / preventative action (CAPA) process, provide an aggregate view of quality that could be communicated to senior leadership, and give insights on how to recognize and resolve quality issues in order to increase market share and company success.

STARTING ON THE RIGHT PATH

It was important that they work with a partner that could bring quality knowledge and expertise to the table. Additionally, they wanted a solution that could offer out-of-the-box quality workflows based on best practices. To that end, the company selected the TrackWise QMS solution to streamline their RCCA process.

Initial implementation and deployment of TrackWise QMS took about 7 months, from requirements gathering to "Go Live", spanning across three manufacturing groups. The second phase took about 11 months and added functionality to help with installed base quality.

“With TrackWise, we can identify and resolve quality events faster, while reducing repeat issues. This helps us provide customers with a successful experience. And I now have the data to show our performance.” - E.N. Senior Director of Global Quality

ENSURING ACCURACY & VISIBILITY OF QUALITY EVENTS

A critical component of this project was implementing a solution that could integrate with other essential systems. Today, TrackWise integrates with approximately 24 related processes managed by the company’s ERP and other business systems, ensuring quality across manufacturing, supply chain, engineering, and global quality teams. This ensures both accuracy and productivity, as there’s no need to re-enter or re-type information.

To keep up with ever-changing business processes and quality requirements, the company extensively leverages the TrackWise Coordinator functionality, managing system enhancements and changes on a monthly basis.

By leveraging TrackWise and its integration capabilities, the company reduced the time it takes the field service team to enter non-conformances down to three minutes through its field service portal. Due to this ease of capturing quality incidents, the company now collects more than 2x the number of issues from the field, increasing visibility into their customers’ experience.

Because issues around the world may have the same symptom and that there is never "one" root cause to any problem, quality events are often "one to many" and "many to one". The global quality group is able to manage this aspect of quality management through TrackWise’s ability to link multiple incidents. This has helped increase visibility across the enterprise, allowing the global quality group to know what’s going wrong and where – and then work to capture and resolve issues efficiently and effectively.

IGNITING A CULTURE OF QUALITY

Managing quality and warranty events with TrackWise QMS has laid the foundation for increasing competitive advantage in the industry. Since launching TrackWise, the company has been able to accurately measure and record shorter investigation times. Additionally, they have been awarded back-to-back Supplier Quality Excellence awards from a leading semiconductor manufacturer.

With increased visibility and a focus on "customer first", they are seeing a positive shift in a "culture of quality" across the company.