Executives from NinaTek discuss problems faced by manufacturers and ways their product has been designed to help meet these challenges.

The product lifecycle doesn't end after it ships:

NinaTek's Nlighten integrates the different segments of the product lifecycle for product engineers and completes the PLM view by including product field performance metrics. Nlighten pulls data from multiple PLM sources, such as warranty, field service, and manufacturing, into a unified product analytic data model. The data is then transformed into an easy-to-use visual interface that interprets the analysis results and guides users to the next logical step. As a result, manufacturers gain the ability to:

• Identify & resolve field issues before they become a crisis


• Speed time to product improvements


• Avoid problems from the past in new designs


• Decrease product lifecycle costs

Manufacturers need to dynamically monitor field performance while there is still time to save on warranty costs and customer perceptions:

"Most of the current quality and reliability software applications on the market today are basically reporting tools that summarize product failures after it's too late to fix them," says vp of engineering Will McKinney. "Nlighten, however, provides a Dynamic Monitoring and Alert System for products still in-service so engineers can fix field issues while there is still time to save on warranty costs and customer perceptions. Nlighten's wizard enables engineers to easily set alerts to dynamically monitor field product performance metrics from categories such as customers, suppliers, product lines, factories, and component parts."

Engineers need the ability to evaluate tradeoffs between design alternatives by exposing full lifecycle costs:

"It is well known that 80% of product lifecycle costs are preordained in the design phase and therefore make it critical to provide engineers with lifecycle analysis capabilities to make the best choices," says Ken Vartanian, vp sales and marketing. "Nlighten's economic analysis capabilities enable design engineers to evaluate tradeoffs between design alternatives and optimize lifecycle costs. Additionally, engineers can make more informed part and design reuse decisions by exposing full lifecycle costs. Nlighten's Technical and Financial Analysis Module is based on a product-centric data model that is optimized for dynamic query and engineering analytics of large data sets. It includes survival analysis, repeat failures, MTBF and MTTF, ROI, lifecycle cost predictions, break-even analytics, and more."

Mike Barry, NinaTek's president/CEO, says, "Part of NinaTek's goal is to help engineers understand the economic impact of the decisions they make. For example, when they're told to cut warranty expense by 15%, they need to know where to look and how to prioritize the issues that need to be fixed. To make the most informed decisions, engineers need to consider the current cost of repairs, and which parts and systems produce the biggest shares of those costs. Engineers also need to know the actual cost of a failure, in both parts and labor, in addition to MTBF. Then they need the ability to measure the results after their redesigns, to see if they made their goal."

How manufacturers can determine the economic benefit of different product redesigns through access to full lifecycle costs:

"Nlighten allows engineers to select a certain part and directly access the economic analytics they need to make decisions that will have a higher impact on the bottom line, such as how much it costs the company, and how much it costs in customer downtime," according to Josh Siler, NinaTek's director of technology. "Nlighten then provides engineers the tools they need to determine root cause, such as which manufacturing plant produces the most failures, and/or in which region. Engineers also need to determine the benefit of a change, for instance, how much it will cost to do a redesign or to retool the factory, and, bottom line, how much will be saved over the long run. Nlighten equips them with the ability to estimate what their year-over-year ROI is going to be on a change, and it also allows managers to objectively compare different engineering changes, and compare which project has a better ROI."

Engineers can avoid repeating past design mistakes by searching design history when developing new products:

"Most design analysis software applications are based on simulated data, rather than actual performance data from the field," says McKinney. "Additionally, the lifecycle data that typically exists is scattered in several databases from different departments. Now Nlighten offers a Design Scenario Management Module that captures, stores, organizes, and compares analysis results from actual field data (current and historical), from any or all of the various PLM sources. Additionally, Nlighten assigns case investigations to multiple engineers for simultaneous analysis, analyzes alternative design scenarios, and rolls up individual cases related to an improvement project into a portfolio. Cases can then be searched for future reference for new product development."

Nlighten's product-centric data model tracks PLM events, such as production and field service events:

• Product production events: capture configuration and Bill of Material (BOM) information to model population base for accurate analysis down to the part level.


• Field service events: capture failure heuristics from incidents such as warranty, field repairs, call center and telemetric sources.


• Other events: Nlighten's product performance data model is also extensible to capture factors such as SIC, customer, dealer, supplier, manufacturing plant, and geography.


• Metrics include: unit usage rate, time based failure incidents, and repair costs including travel, labor and more. Extensive business rules and quality checks validate and identify inconsistencies from data originating from multiple sources.