Company Profile: Semiconductor Equipment Manufacturer
$120M Revenue
Field Service Engineers providing warrantee service globally
Labor savings from PLM: minimum $24,000/yr
Field service personnel often have to replace parts on customer systems. The parts are large and highly specialized. The FSE has to identify the correct part number to place orders for airfreight delivery to assure a rapid resolution to the customer situation. To facilitate their work, their department head instituted a process to provide part drawings for his personnel on CD’s.
Process:
The company developed its product designs on advanced 3D CAD systems and the designers and drafters had complete electronic drawings within the CAD system, however were not generating formats that were readable outside the CAD application. As a result drawings were being plotted using a D size printer, filmed to microfiche and placed in microfiche files at various locations within the manufacturing environment. So all parts were put through the following steps:
Note that at no point is the initial plotted drawing retained.
Once the cards were in the files then the field service process would step in. Their process looked like this:
Note again the paper drawing and even the microfiche do not serve any purpose other than a transition data set. This process would be repeated quarterly for hundreds of parts to assure that the part record held by the FSE’s was reasonably up to date.
So to look at the cost of this process lets’ make some basic assumptions which may be simplifications however they will get the point across. Assume a clerk is performing the work so might be earning $14/hr or $20/hour burdened. This is a reasonable estimate for most high tech companies.
The document control portion of the process for generating each microfiche card and filing it is roughly 45 minutes. The field service clerk is then spending approximately 15 minutes per item. So for each drawing one hour is spent taking an electronic file to paper to film to paper and back to electronic format. Multiply that by 300 drawings per quarter or 1200 hours per year. Which means that $24,000 is spent on this one process per year, not including the risks that a part has changed in the interim and that the FSE obtains out of date information.
With a PLM System in place a few months later, the same situation looked more like this:
And the total process takes minutes rather than hours with direct access to the latest information needed by the FSE.
So with one minor process, not highly visible to the corporation, a minimum of $24,000 of labor cost was recovered for more valued activities per year.
Copyright 2006, LR Hirr, All Rights Reserved
