AssurX Helps United Space Alliance Take Flight
AssurX CATSWeb Software
Space exploration may be the final frontier, but for United Space Alliance LLC of Houston, Texas, the prime contractor for NASA’s Space Shuttle program, safety and quality assurance are still the first priorities.
For that reason, it’s not surprising that when USA went looking for a quality tracking application to manage corrective actions in support of human space flight operations, it turned to AssurX Inc.’s CATSWeb software.
CATSWeb allows USA to implement a common quality tracking system for more than 8,000 users in all operating groups, NASA customer organizations and strategic business partners. It’s the right solution for USA, one the company took its time analyzing before deciding on implementation.
“After extensive evaluation, we selected CATSWeb because it scored significantly higher than any other system we evaluated, including in-house developed solutions,” says Shawn Pifer, USA’s director of program integration technical information systems.
“We were looking for an easy-to-use solution to integrate our existing information systems and processes,” continues Pifer. “In addition to providing secure electronic signature controls and audit trail functionality, we can add automation specific to our workflows without making changes to the core program. We were also impressed by AssurX’s extensive and successful installed customer base.”
“We are proud to have come through USA’s extensive evaluation process as the system of choice,” states Sal Lucido, vice president of AssurX’s Enterprise Solutions division. “The AssurX Enterprise Solutions Group, comprised of quality assurance and technology experts, will work with USA to create a process rooted in industry best practices for use across the enterprise.”
The CATSWeb product line was launched in 1996 in response to the growing need for automatic quality tracking processes. Before that time, many companies focused their automated tracking efforts on enterprise resource planning (ERP) processes. As ISO 9001 developed into a ubiquitous standard, businesses searched for ways to implement qual-ity improvement processes that affected financial performance instead of simply fulfilling ISO requirements. This led quality professionals away from paper spreadsheets and toward enterprisewide and computerized solutions.
Today’s generation of automated tracking systems, such as CATSWeb, allow organizations to trend problems, interpret root causes and find solutions that affect the bottom line. CATSWeb does this by automating quality tracking processes including deviations, improvement suggestions, audit findings, defects, safety incidents and any other issue from origination and disposition through corrective/preventive action and effective follow-up.
Dick Beagley, USA’s vice president for safety, quality and mission assurance, championed the integration of USA’s numerous nonconformance and corrective action systems into AssurX’s CATSWeb application. “The integration of USA’s systems into a single system will standardize processes across multiple Space Shuttle elements, improve data trending and corrective action monitoring, and provide a better platform for data mining to strengthen our safety processes,” he says.
Beagley refers to a key function of the CATSWeb solution, which is its utility for every part of the enterprise--not only production, quality assurance and safety, but customer service, product development, procurement and finance, where the platform is capable of tracking issues associated with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
CATSWeb’s speed, reliability and adaptability strongly influenced USA’s decision to implement it. In addition to an uptime record exceeding 99.9 percent, less than 50 kilobytes per page and sub-second response times, CATSWeb is validated to work with Web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Netscape, Safari, Mozilla, Foxfire and Opera along with operating systems from Microsoft to Linux to Macintosh. It also features comprehensive integration capabilities and is easily configurable.
“Because AssurX designed CATSWeb to be configured by customers themselves, the different USA operating groups will then be able to further set up the process to meet their unique requirements,” Lucido says. “This represents the best of both worlds: an off-the-shelf enterprise standard that can be configured to meet the customer’s specific needs.”
AssurX CATSWeb Software
- Scalable for hundreds or thousands of users
- Integrates with information systems such as ERP, MES and SCM
- Modifiable without changes in the core program
- Provides enterprisewide tracking
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