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Departments: Quality Applications
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SPC Collection Software Saves Time and Reduces Waste

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Midwest Machining Company Implements Real-Time Process Control

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Height Gage Helps Pennsylvania Shop Raise Quality Levels

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Golf Club Manufacturer Implements Quality Management System

Golf Club Manufacturer Implements Quality Management System
MetricStream's Quality*Stream

TaylorMade-adidas Golf is one of the largest golf club manufacturers in the world. The company's metalwoods, irons, wedges and putters are widely used by professionals on the PGA tour.

TaylorMade uses a complex supply chain in its global operations. Suppliers from many continents cooperate in manufacturing the thousands of variations in a club, such as lie, loft and face-angle, that give professional and amateur golfers the performance they seek. The company has to manage hundreds of process attributes on each club--measurements taken at different times and locations--to ensure minimal variance and maximum adherence to standards.

A need for an enterprisewide footprint for supplier quality was realized. Several managers had already worked with smaller off-the-shelf products that addressed one piece of the quality management puzzle, but they unanimously agreed on a need for an enterprisewide platform that would bring together all quality initiatives and functionality. The software had to be able to proactively manage hundreds of suppliers, thousands of SKUs and millions of inspections daily. They needed a system capable of aggregating, analyzing and reporting information to key business owners as well as forming a platform for collaborating on various design, manufacturing and process management issues. Quality*Stream, a QMS from MetricStream, seemed to fit the bill.

MetricStream is a five-year-old company that provides enterprise quality management systems for global corporations. The company supplies a scaleable and extensible Web-based solution to address business processes and business events.

Quality*Stream enterprise level software was chosen to implement the stringent quality control standards that the TaylorMade Golf managers had set. Because Quality*Stream is built on a flexible process flow designer and the configurable MetricStream EPM platform, no expensive customization was required to integrate the system into TaylorMade processes.

Within three weeks, service professionals modeled both internal and external inspection processes, standards and control limits, Cpk standards, processed attributes and sample sizes. Users at supplier sites worldwide were able to access, input and modify data over 28.8 K modems. To prevent any data entry errors, various soft checks were put into place, and dropdown lists were used to quickly help the operators select their desired data entry options.

"In the old days, we were merely trying to track quality, not really control it," says Rueben Inofuentes, chief information systems architect at TaylorMade. "Quality*Stream has given us the ability to manage the quality of our supply base.

We don't waste time faxing and receiving documents; we have the information we need at our fingertips, and we can proactively measure and improve quality even prior to doing a single inspection ourselves."

At the end of the three-week period, supplier quality engineers were paged within hours of a batch of inventory failing to measure up to standards, giving engineers several days to fix the issue. Any nonconformaties were fed into a nonconformance module to be managed and converted into an action plan.

"We're looking forward to leveraging the MetricStream platform to improve the quality issues associated with our reverse logistics process, our custom production processes, and other customer-facing interactions such as credit and receivables management. The core message to all of this is quality, and central to our quality initiative is Quality*Stream."

 

MetricStream's Quality*Stream

Benefits

  • Runs automated diagnostics to help identify root causes
  • Mitigates the impact of quality events
  • Collaboratively manages corrective action requests

www.metricstream.com