Siemens Folds CAPA Quality Management Into Teamcenter

Consider the recent headlines regarding battery problems with the now-grounded and once highly lauded Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft, and it’s not hard to see why engineering and manufacturing executives lose lots of sleep over quality issues and why formal quality management programs are so crucial to a product’s ultimate success.

With that in mind, Siemens PLM Software joins a number of other PLM vendors folding quality management capabilities into their PLM platforms. Siemens, like fellow PLM providers PTC and Aras Software, among others, claim that the integration of the two solutions can provide greater visibility into quality management processes while aiding in faster time-to-closure for quality issues. The company’s new Teamcenter Quality Management with corrective and preventive actions (CAPA) is designed to provide an enterprise-wide product quality management platform for capturing various forms of complaints, defects, and non-conformances while allowing the quality management team to share the same views of information already in place for the engineering and manufacturing teams.

Al Hufstetler, Siemens PLM Software’s vice president of product management for manufacturing and engineering, said the new Quality Management/CAPA module was a direct result of feedback from customers who wanted to incorporate quality management as part of their broader PLM strategy as opposed to the traditional approach of maintaining a quality system as a silo.

“Companies want to be able to capture their intellectual capital and best practices and avoid having to go through the full process of finding the problems and taking preventive action,” Hufstetler explains. “They want the results integrated as part of their product design process so they don’t make the same mistakes again.”

Hufstetler says Teamcenter customers see the value of managing product and manufacturing data as an enterprise system and process and view CAPA as the next logical extension. By capturing data and creating workflows from a single platform, companies gain a holistic view of potential issues and can relate them directly back to design requirements or even the process definitions used to manufacture the product. “It just seems to really make sense to tie it to the PLM engine,” he says.

According to an Aberdeen Research report, integration of quality management systems into a core Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) can help reduce internal and external failure costs by more than 50%, while diminishing the total cost of quality by 8%—hardly chump change in today’s still economically-challenged business environment.

Teamcenter’s new CAPA solution, available as a Web-based offering, integrates quality and change management processes for root-cause identification, correction, prevention, and verification. The software works within the Active Workspace environment to deliver a user experience that can be customized and personalized to individual need.

To hear more about Siemens PLM Software’s Teamcenter CAPA solution, watch the video below.