Building PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) Systems

PLM system is one of the mission critical IT systems in the manufacturing industries working with ERP, CRM and MES systems.  PLM system manages intellectual assets of the companies including product design, R&D information, project information and product development processes.  The product lifecycle starts from the conceptualization of the idea, product design, process design, manufacturing ramp up to the services.  PLM system supports the business processes by managing the information and processes throughout the product lifecycle.

A few key application areas of PLM systems includes:

• Requirement management
• Project/ program management
• Design information management
• BOM (Bill of Material) management
• Manufacturing process design
• Quality Problem Management
• Product configuration management
• Etc.

We are specialized in deploying PLM system to the following industries.

• Automotive industry (OEMs and Tier 1 & 2 suppliers)
• Electronics industry
• Machine & equipment manufacturing industry
• Mold & Die industry
• Electric tool manufacturing industry

Technology Outsourcing

In developing product from the idea, some technologies are out of the capability (or not the core competency) of the enterprise.  This may not be the obstacle that makes the enterprise give up if there are right technology providers.  The problem is how to find and evaluate the potential partners who have the right technology and how to develop strategic partnership for the sustainable business.

We have global technological network world-wide enabling us to find and evaluate technological partners who can provide the right technology to our clients.  The areas that we can assist clients are:

• Identifying technology requirements
• Evaluating the internal technological capability
• Finding and evaluating potential technological partners
• Design and manufacturing requirement identification
• Commercial partnership contract with the technology partners
• Project/program management of the technology outsourcing

The technologies we can assist includes:

• Semiconductor process related technologies
  - opto-electronics
  - nano-level micro control
  - metrology & alignment
  - micro-electronics equipment control software
  - etc.
  
  
• Automotive vehicle design
  - body design
  - chassis design
  - body control modules design
  - chassis control module design
  - etc.

Product Development Process Design

We assist clients who need to develop or rationalize the product development process.  We have the PDP (Product Development Process) template based on the best practices of many leading enterprises.  On the basis of the process template, we assist clients to customize the process according to client's business requirements.   The benefits of the PDP-based process design are removing non-productive activities in the product development process, reducing the time to market and improve product quality by applying systems engineering concept proven by the leading enterprises.

The industries we serve clients includes:

• Electronics industries
• Semiconductor and display industries
• Semiconductor equipment manufacturing industries
• Automotive Industries

FMEA (Failure Mode Effect Analysis) Consulting

The industry average of the COPQ (Cost of Poor Quality) reaches 20-30% of the revenue.  According to the research, the cost of the product failure in the market can be 1,000,000 times of that of the conceptualization stage.  So detecting and removing failures in the early stage is extremely important the manufacturing industry.

FMEA is a proven technique to prevent the failure of products, processes and equipments.  It was developed in mid 20th century to prevent the failure of defense systems.  Over the decades, FMEA has been widely adopted by many industries in order to remove potential quality problems in advance before the failure occurs. Many industry standards including QS9000 and TS16949 in automotive industry, Sematech in semiconductor industry and others adopted this as a part of standard process to assure the quality of the product.

FMEA predicts potential failures and prioritize risks by assessing the effects, causes and controllability of the failure.  The prioritized risk factors enables the enterprise to take corrective action in advance.

However, implementing FMEA technique in design, manufacturing and maintenance has a few difficulties:

• It requires high degree of engineering knowledge, which not all the engineers have in the organization
• The FMEA data does not highlight the mechanism of the failure
• The corrective actions are not tightly followed up as closed loops

A new methodology called "Advanced FMEA", originated in Tokyo University, was developed to overcome these issues.  Critical improvements over the generic FMEA technique are:

• Organizing failure mode  library
• Failure mode prediction method
• FMM (Failure Mode Mechanism)
• Closed loop  follow up of recommended action

ConneXwave coaches clients to deploy Advanced FMEA in alliance with GDnP who owns the patent of the methodology and software tool.