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cSHARE Success Story
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Implementing a
Global, Web-Based Product Development, Collaboration,
and Supply Chain Environment
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“cSHARE is very much
committed to our business. We’ve challenged them to do
a lot of things, and they’ve come back with effective
solutions. They’re providing the knowledge and input
necessary to help us implement best practices for
product development.”
Neal Curran
Vice President of Engineering and Product
Development, Invacare Corporation
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Invacare Corporation
Invacare is the industry leader in
the $6-billion worldwide market for home medical
products, manufacturing and distributing the world’s
broadest product offering to more than 25,000
independent home medical equipment providers worldwide.
Headquartered in Elyria, Ohio, Invacare manufactures
products in four categories (standard products, rehab
products, respiratory products, and medical supplies)
and has manufacturing plants in the United States,
Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, France, Mexico, New
Zealand, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United
Kingdom. The company strives to improve, expand,
and broaden its existing product lines, and recently
introduced 75 new products to replace 90 percent of its
major equipment product line sales in 2003.
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Results:
·
Shortened
product development cycle by 25 percent.
·
Increased
amount of engineering time spent on new product development.
·
Met FDA
standards for electronic product documentation.
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Implemented
web-based global sourcing and procurement system. |
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 The
Challenge
Invacare’s success as the world’s leading manufacturer of
home medical products rests with the company’s commitment to
developing high-quality products and leveraging design and
manufacturing technologies in innovative and strategic
ways. Recently, the company’s commitment to product
development took on even greater emphasis as Invacare
management initiated a strategic plan to leverage new
product development to gain market share and maintain the
company’s competitive edge. Invacare established strategic
objectives that would enable it to introduce greater numbers
of new products more quickly by accelerating product design
efforts, maximizing engineering resources, making product
documentation processes — required by the federal Food and
Drug Administration (FDA) — more efficient, utilizing
product design data across facilities throughout North
America, and employing data management technologies to
establish a global sourcing, vendor, and procurement
network. For assistance in implementing an enterprise-wide
product data management (PDM) system, Invacare leveraged
cSHARE consulting services.
The Solution
To
achieve its goals, Invacare implemented the SMARTEAM®
PDM system, including modules that support FDA compliance (SmartFDA)
and worldwide sourcing and procurement (MySmarteam). Yet the
SMARTEAM implementation was not the standard out-of-the-box
install. cSHARE provided consulting services on workflows,
processes, protocols, and procedures; training; and additional
programming services to customize the SMARTEAM solution to
automate certain processes and meet specific Invacare needs.
“Given
the number and complexity of the product data we produce, we
needed a good PDM system to manage, document, and leverage the
large volume of design data,” recalls Tom Herb, Manager of
Invacare’s Corporate Documentation Group. “We also have to
meet stringent FDA requirements to document every product
design change. Traditionally, that’s been a manual system,
and we were looking to cSHARE for a solution to make
documentation more efficient.”
“cSHARE
played a vital role in helping Invacare define its CAD and PDM
standards as well as its strategy for collaborating with
internal users and external suppliers,” says Miles Perry,
Director of Application Development at Invacare. “They gained
the trust and respect of our internal users and excelled at
working with them to evaluate our design control processes and
map out how different solutions could be pieced together to
meet our needs in a cost-effective manner. cSHARE is a true
business partner.”
Working
with cSHARE, Invacare has successfully implemented a worldwide
PDM system (SMARTEAM), which meets FDA documentation
requirements and supports global sourcing and procurement.
Invacare can now access product design data from any of its
facilities in a standard data format, generate design drawings
automatically, and transmit design data to colleagues,
vendors, and suppliers anywhere in the world.
“cSHARE’s solutions have definitely allowed us to get closer
to a true collaborative environment with our remote facilities
and enabled us to make tremendous headway in making our
documentation efforts more efficient,” Herb says.
The Results
According to Neal Curran, Vice President of Engineering and
Product Development, the PDM solutions cSHARE has provided to
Invacare have helped the company meet its objectives of
developing new products faster, better, and more
cost-effectively.
“We’ve
been able to reduce our design cycle time significantly, from
12 to nine months, and refocus more of our effort on new
product development. Now, with a better design platform,
improved access to design data, and more efficient data
management and documentation, our engineers have been able to
continue to support operational initiatives as well as
increase work on new product development,” Curran says. “We
have realized quite a boost in productivity.
“cSHARE is very
much committed to our business. We’ve challenged them to do a
lot of things, and they’ve come back with effective
solutions. They’re providing the knowledge and input
necessary to help us implement best practices for product
development,” he adds.
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