Ingersoll Rand’s VP of Controls Engineering discusses how managing requirements, with traceability, throughout the product development process is the key to ensuring high product quality and meeting customer needs.
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The use of software in many Ingersoll Rand product lines continues to grow as innovative solutions emerge to enable greater functionality for the end user. To manage such growth, cross-discipline engineering teams must collaborate and ensure the right capabilities are delivered through the product development process.
Managing and tracing requirements from design to development, through to product testing, is a core process that helps to ensure high product quality and satisfied customers. Tracking development activities to ensure predictable outcomes requires a well-integrated solution that can handle growth on a global scale. PTC Integrity helps Ingersoll Rand engineering teams improve processes to work more efficiently, driving accelerated growth for the company.
Video Transcript
Customers use our products in different ways today. They expect to be able to access information anywhere. So, we've created web based products that are quite often mobile. So, they work on phone as well as your iPad or your computer. They also require you to be wireless. So, it's created a more complex system. You know, the whole process is more complex and software is really the glue that holds it all together.
If you think about product development from a cross discipline standpoint, requirements capture is very common and then it kind of diverges into different areas whether developing a compressor for a piece of equipment or the user interface for the users who interface with the equipment. It uses a very similar process. To be able to manage and track that throughout the process of the development activities requires really good tools and process to make sure you have predictable outcomes.
Real drivers behind the change has been, we've just outgrown our tools. We had some pretty nice homegrown tools in the past for requirements, capture for document retention, for change control, to test management, but they weren't well integrated. So, you know, going to a more integrated solution like the PTC Integrity Solution gives us an opportunity to make us more efficient and improve the quality, because we don't miss things along the process.
The linkage between corporate goals and our project goals are really around growth. So, if you look at the things that we're doing in the area of process improvement it's going to drive accelerated growth and at the same time improve quality.