E-Collaboration Delivers 30% Improved Efficiency for Electronics Design Firm

Leaders in their field, with over 15 years experience in the sector, Quantum CAD specializes in product and PCB design, high-speed digital electronics and consulting and training. Having experienced rapid growth in recent years, Quantum CAD were witnessing increased costs as a result of manually managing product data for all their customers’ projects. This triggered the decision to find a solution to reduce these costs, increase productivity, process efficiency and competitiveness. This would provide control over managing data and collaboration with their customers and partners across the supply chain.



“We identified that in order to outperform our competitors and improve our product development execution, we needed to introduce an e-collaboration platform. We evaluated a number of solutions and found Adeon’s CXInsight to be the most suited in terms of cost, ease of adoption and functionality and it’s applicability to the electronics industry. It met all of our electronic design requirements and unlike other PDM products was not biased to mechanical, non-software managed workflows,” said Steve Jones, managing director at Quantum CAD.



CXInsight is easy to use, firewall secure, able to integrate with CAD and office/enterprise solutions and is capable of internal and external/remote connectivity. Quantum also required the system to handle cost and project management and file management with integrated workflow. At Quantum the implementation of CXInsight has not only increased the visibility and handling of changes but has delivered a significant 30% improved efficiency, increased automated workflow traceability and process compliance and higher productivity levels. At the touch of a button users can easily locate and access the latest up-to-date files.



“We implemented CXInsight 6 months ago and have seen significant improvements in our levels of project management efficiency and collaboration with customers, OEMs and CEMs using its powerful e-collaboration technology. The system has exceeded our expectations and we are delighted with the benefits realized, we have cut ECO verification time by a staggering 30% and the same reduction in development and status time management,” said Carl O’Roche, product manager at Quantum.



“Quantum identified that 70 % of the cost of taking product to market is accountable to development. CXInsight helps them to significantly reduce these high development and operational costs as well as improving product quality. Quantum already has an excellent reputation in the UK electronics market and CXInsight is now helping to secure their position as a premier electronics design engineering firm,” said Jan Keijzer, managing director at Adeon Software House.



Quantum rolled out CXInsight in less than four weeks and found it easy to configure. The in-depth user training was also invaluable. The modules implemented include file management, internal change management, workflow management, time/project management and internal/external collaboration.



CXInsight is a dedicated project and product data management and e-collaboration system specifically built by electronics specialists for the electronics design and manufacturing industry. Configured to work across all disciplines from design, purchasing, engineering right down to the factory floor for assembly and test, it allows internal and external collaboration between project partners in both the design and manufacturing environments and for users to have full visibility and access to data across NPI projects, activities and tasks.



It enables designers and manufacturers to communicate in a secure project room across the web and work concurrently on managing change to project content, regardless of location, language and time zone. The CXInsight system delivers proven benefits in tracking and documenting the manufacturing process from suppliers, OEMs, CEMs, distributors and other supply chain partners.



As a Manufacturing Information management system, CXInsight works down to the factory floor, distributing production files, tracking, and version control. More formal, non-electronics PLM/PDM systems are too broad for such a niche requirement, and are not suited to the exacting needs of the dynamic electronics design and NPI environments. In this way CXInsight delivers full product data management capability from which stable product data sets can be uploaded in the enterprise-wide formal PDM systems when required.



“Our excellent e-collaboration functionality allows users to seamlessly link into their customers enterprise wide PLM systems, regardless of brand, but we also allow OEMs and CEMs to invite their customers as project members directly into their secure CXInsight infrastructure. This is a key differentiator for CXInsight and something that the heavy-duty formal PDM systems cannot easily do,” Jan added. “We will be extending the use of CXInsight even further and the future release of CXInsight 5.2 will broaden the reach of functionality with advanced hierarchical BOM management and new supply chain integration capabilities.”