What we did
PRG provided the company with our NPI solution which allowed multiple, diverse PRG experts to be brought in as required to accelerate progress.
Results
The company exceeded their next-generation product business requirements through the establishment of NPI, Quality, Reliability, and cost reduction processes and regained their biggest customer.
Company: Tier 1 Semiconductors
Headquarters: Silicon Valley, California, USA
What they do: This Tier 1 company is an equipment and solutions provider of semiconductor simulation and testing.
Challenge
The company had global expertise in the creation of semiconductor design software but wanted to expand into the hardware realm. So they acquired an international division making high-end test equipment for major semiconductor manufacturers. The equipment had a poor record of reliability and system performance was disappointing their biggest customer. The downtime was exceeding requirements and components were failing regularly with an associated costly and risky repair and rework cycle.
Solution
PRG provided a group of seasoned New Product Introduction (NPI) process experts to address the company’s issues as part of the NPI IMPACT solution and helped build a strong in-house team for supporting current and future growth.
PRG’s team of industry veterans supported the following activities
- Project governance planning and management
- NPI program management
- Product reliability
- Quality Systems engineering
- Test development engineering
- Production documentation and process optimization
- Materials, supply chain, and contract manufacturing.
Charting the way forward
To grow business, many companies will partner with and, in some cases, buy other businesses who have complementary products and technologies. This company is known for deep expertise in its software solution, but wanted to broaden its’ business by acquiring a leading hardware company outside
of their domain expertise. The hardware product, however, had inconsistent product performance as well as excessive downtime. Continued rework was required because of electronic component failures. This drained the company’s resources and ability to support it’s ongoing successful business.
Creating clarity for progress
The hardware business that the company acquired had strong hardware development capabilities but weak product lifecycle and program management processes. For its’ next generation product the company wanted to:
- Substantially improve system performance
- Increase system uptime
- Reduce component failures
- Avoid costly and risky electronic rework
- Reduce overall cost to manufacture, increasing profitability.
PRG’s team of experienced engineers and consultants were able to add value to the company on day 1. We didn’t lose time trying to find and then train a team of new employees, saving us time and money. Since our new product has been deployed, the improvement in quality and reliability have been like night and day.
— Senior Director of Operations
The right people, processes, and relationships
PRG mobilized the highest-level skills across a broad team of experts to generate new ways of working to bring quality, reliability, and profitability to the company’s product.
Technical program management
One of PRG’s NPI technical program managers (TPMs) set up the core team structure for the NPI process and then established a phase-gate product life cycle methodology for the team.
Quality systems engineer
One of PRG’s quality systems engineers provided expertise in quality programs resulting in a substantial improvement to the company’s quality team’s ability to identify and track quality issues to closure and improving the quality of the next generation product.
Product reliability expert
PRG’s product reliability expert analyzed downtime data from the existing system to develop a reliability improvement program that closed the biggest reliability gaps and set up higher reliability attainments for the company’s next generation product, resulting in a 5x improvement in product uptime.
The final result
By leveraging PRG’s on-demand team of NPI IMPACT experts, the company exceeded their next generation product’s goals for consistent quality, reliability, and reduced cost, reclaiming their biggest client as a customer.
Key benefits of engagement with PRG
- Established a best-in-class NPI and Quality process
- Integrated support
- Provided release documentation for eventual ISO certification
- Improved system performance
Increased system uptime by over 5x - Reduced electronic component failures
- Demonstrated greater reliability
- Built a collaborative product development team
- Greatly increased demand for the company’s next generation product
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