Research and Development

Reduce warranty claims

Cross-company access to test, repair, and RMA data allows your company to learn from past mistakes and continuously improve. The root causes of many warranty claims can be found in design and manufacturing. Unless you can see the full history of a product, you’ll always suffer from unnecessary warranty costs.

Reduce time spent on data mining and data organizing

Easy access to test and repair data means you no longer have to spend valuable R&D resources collecting it. Not only is data collection automated, WATS completely removes the need to organize your data for use in comparative analysis.

Travel less for NPI support and debugging

On-site NPI support and performance debugging are widespread, everyday activities, whether you have your own manufacturing or you outsource it. When all relevant parties have real-time access to manufacturing data, the ability to collaborate remotely skyrockets. This means that key personnel when faced with a problem, can share their expertise without having to be physically at the factory.

Cross-functional collaboration

Test data shouldn’t just contain information about if a product passed a test or not. It should contain contextual information about what type of product it is, what revision, the test station and interface it was tested on, who did the test, and so on. If you can link this data to repair and RMA data, you have complete transparency between the different symptoms detected in the test and the validated outcome.

When all this contextual metadata is present, different stakeholders in a company can look at the same piece of data from their relevant point of view. It means that data does not have to move from one system to the next for you to provide valuable input.

Effective collaboration with subcontractors

Have you ever been called up by your contract manufacturer to learn that the test throughput has been horrible for several days? Or received a statement of quality saying that there were absolutely NO test failures in the batch of units you just received? If so, you are not alone. And unless you have access to their test data, this will probably continue. WATS helps ensure that both parties instantly have access to the same data and can detect and delegate problems as they appear.

Less manufacturing material and labour waste

Scraping, repairing, and retesting can represent a considerable part of the unit cost of the products you sell. These are often controllable and unnecessary expenses that companies lack the visibility to address. WATS helps you expose relevant performance indicators to improve your sales margins and make more money available for future R&D projects.