Global Defense Manufacturer Leverages Goldfire InnovatorTM to Get Key Component Back in Flight
 
 
A leading European manufacturer specializing in surveillance, targeting, tracking, protection and imaging systems for the defense industry, needed to tackle an engineering problem, fast. With maintenance costs affecting the profitability for one of its core products due to a critical component failure, the company's quality engineers were scrambling to quickly identify, analyze and resolve the device defect. After months of unsuccessful attempts, the manufacturer turned to Invention Machine and its flagship product, Goldfire Innovator™ to help them identify and resolve the issue.

Leading manufacturers, like this global defense industry supplier, recognize that critical to innovating new products or rehabilitating and improving existing products is the establishment of consistent innovation processes that integrate design, quality planning and defect identification, analysis and resolution. Systematic approaches to Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA), Root Cause Analysis and Reliability Engineering that can tap into internal and external knowledge sources are key to not only diagnosing unexpected product failures, but also to driving better product design.

Goldfire Innovator supports numerous popular engineering and quality improvement processes (including Six Sigma, DFSS, QFD, and FMEA), delivering a platform to assist in idea generation, capture design intent, and optimize anticipatory problem analyses by incorporating proven methodologies with precise 'on-demand' access to technical knowledge inside and outside a company's four walls.

In this instance, the defense manufacturer, had been working to identify a solution to the failure of a critical component of an aircraft device for more than 12 months, but had yet to identify the cause for the device's failure – let alone a solution.

Using Goldfire Innovator, a team of quality engineers, leveraging their own knowledge and experience, first built a root cause model to analyze and document a chain of effects and their causes. Goldfire Innovator’s Cause Effect finder, drawing upon Goldfire Innovator’s access to a spectrum of technical knowledge and patent literature, further automated this process by suggesting known cause 'chains' related to the problem at hand. In doing so, the Cause Effect finder identified an 'unknown' cause – one that had not previously been understood by the quality engineers involved in the analysis as it was so specific to the type of material used in the device in question.

Once the root cause of the device failure was analyzed and understood, the engineers then used Goldfire Innovator's Solution Manager to search for plausible solutions to the problem. The Solution Manager quickly identified a material that would meet the requirements of the device. To the engineer's surprise, this solution was found in their own corporate knowledge bases: critical information already known within select pockets of the company, but unknown to the engineers who had been working to solve this problem for over a year.