Publication date: 27 May 2010
ProWorks is a division of Everett Charles Technologies (ECT), and the leading developer and manager of print and electronic work instructions. ECT is a leader in the development of advanced technology board test products holding more than 100 patents. A manufacturing powerhouse, ECT has broadened its business through acquisition and managed growth to include international manufacturing of capital equipment (bare board test systems and flying probe systems), bare and loaded board fixturing and test services, and most recently, equipment, sockets and performance boards for semiconductor test operations.
A. We needed the ability to bring in just about any person off of the street, set them in front of a box of parts and, with ProWorks, have that person assembling our products with little to no training at all and produce that product with exceptional quality. If we were able to achieve that goal, then we would easily be able to hire temps when the business ramped up and move people from a slow production line to another line without retraining them. This ability gave us the elasticity to weather the downtimes and to thrive during the uptimes.
A. Other products, such as Office products, are not multilingual, are difficult to maintain, and do not provide the traceability of who assembled what and how long it took.
In order to bring anyone off of the street and have them build a complicated product, the paper system would need to have so much detail that the operators simply would not read it. If it had too little information, it would not be detailed enough for a person to build the product without a lot of training. With ProWorks, there is the ability to have significant detail, including movies, pictures, and CAD drawings that make it very easy for someone to step in and assemble something that they have never seen before.
A. ECT does not have a sales staff dedicated to promoting ProWorks. For a long time, ProWorks was offered only as an in-house tool for other Dover Companies, and was spread primarily by word of mouth. Now that ProWorks is available to anyone, we can leverage a company like ScanCAD, who has many reps around the globe, to provide all the sales and support for us. This frees us up so that we can simply focus on adding new features and improving our product.
A. Being multi-site multilingual, any company with multiple locations can benefit by knowing that all products at every location are manufactured exactly the same. This global standardization of work instructions allows companies to take advantage of various resources available in different countries, while ensuring the products are manufactured with the same quality each time at each location. Switching between the different languages is as simple as toggling the different language tabs located to the right of the instructions. This means that one set of work instructions is used for all languages.
A. One way that ProWorks cuts costs is by pulling customer-specific information into the work instructions, thereby eliminating duplication of data entry. Additionally, many of our customers build products that share a similar base product with different options to specify the individual product. ProWorks can read the ordered product from the ERP system and tailor the work instructions to display only the steps that are specific for the product that was ordered. This helps to minimize mistakes during assembly.
A. Our own R&D department is located at ECT’s headquarters in Pomona, CA. While developing a new product, our engineers will enter the instructions, pictures and movies into ProWorks while they build the first machine in Pomona. Because our servers are replicated with our offices in China, we can have a Chinese engineer translate instructions into Chinese simultaneously. After the first article is finished, we simply ship a crate full of parts to China and, with ProWorks, they are able to assemble a product that they have never seen before. In fact, they are able to assemble those products much faster than we can.
A. The LT version is designed specifically to allow the user to create work instruction content on a database that will allow that content to be multilingual, searchable and easy to maintain. This gives them all of the tools available in ProWorks for authoring as well as an upgrade path if they later decide to expand into a more interactive production environment. They are able to capture their tribal knowledge today with a minimum investment.
A. We have resources to help our customers convert existing work instructions into ProWorks. This alleviates the need for them to provide those resources themselves and helps them get a good head start into using ProWorks on their production floor.
We have a number of canned reports for mining the data within ProWorks. Each customer has very specific needs for certain information. Our developers know the data well and they usually can provide a quick solution to very specific report requirements. Typically, this is provided at no charge to our clients. Our goal is for them to take full advantage of all of the information that ProWorks is already collecting.
A. The maintenance and support agreement gives our customers all of the updates, as well as phone support and report query help as mentioned above.
A. Yes, we are constantly improving and adding new features. We have added a training module to help managers monitor training requirements and records for their staff. We are currently adding the ability for ProWorks to talk to hardware through a CAN bus interface. Our existing customers use RS-232 or File I/O communications to talk to their hardware, but most complex machines are now built with CAN bus, so this should open some possibilities for them.
