Industrial consumer power tools case hero

CASE STUDIES

A Leading Power Tools Manufacturer

A leading power tools manufacturer accelerates testing processes to exceed the expectations of customers with Drishti.

Client Overview

At this American tools manufacturer, the business imperative for speed and innovation runs headfirst into another business imperative: demonstrable safety and durability. After all, this PTIA award winner has a fantastic reputation to uphold.

The demands from the business collide to create immense pressure on the Test Engineering team. On the one hand, the company’s brand and reputation require thorough and deliberate testing; on the other hand, the company’s need for revenue and market share create pressure to move faster.

Like most industries, tools manufacturers are racing against their competitors to bring new products to market. The faster they do so, the quicker they generate revenue and grab market share.

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The challenge: Gain a better understanding of why products fail

In one testing lab, the company’s test engineers engage tools and accessories in high volume usage tests until they break.

Engineers carefully investigate and document the successes and failures of their testing regimen, and pass information back to the product design teams or onto to production teams to ensure assembly is meeting specifications.

Sometimes, a failure is predictable and the analysis is straightforward. Other times, a failure is sudden and unexpected — and, worse, unseen until after the fact. That’s when an engineer has to spend hours or days investigating the failure to understand what happened and why.

With Drishti, this manufacturer wanted to improve the testing process to more quickly and thoroughly test products to demonstrate safety and durability, and catch problems before they go to market.
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The solution: Drishti traceability gives a boost to critical testing know-how

This consumer tools manufacturer deployed Drishti's solution to increase testing speeds while achieving thorough and deliberate testing.

Drishti provided video traceability in their test labs. Video was used at every test station to capture the testing processes.

Drishti was used as a complete application for capturing and storing video. The online platform is as easy as using YouTube. The test team could live stream, browse and search video, study and annotate events in the video, and share clips, playlists, and data across the organization.

Putting Drishti to work

Here’s how the team used Drishti to accelerate their product testing process:

  • Video replay for testing failures. With video of every activity, test engineers studied the point of failure, instead of trying to recreate the event using manufacturing forensics. This accelerated their understanding of the causes of failures.
  • Less pressure to "see everything." Before Drishti, the test engineers faced pressure to constantly observe activities so they can see failures when they happen. This increased their staffing costs. Drishti's video search tools, let them browse by station, date and time, made it easy to find footage of anything they missed.
  • Video annotation for reporting. Test engineers used Drishti’s annotate tools to add data and commentary to specific video clips. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, an annotated video is worth pages and pages of an incident report.
  • Video sharing across product teams. Video sharing tools allowed for much richer knowledge transfer to product designers and NPI teams.
  • Search by smart tool “event.” With our integration to the smart tools used by testers, engineers were able to go back in time instantly and witness when a driver stopped, started, had a rapid change in heat, or quit working for a long period of time

The results: more thorough, efficient testing led to exceeding quality expectations

Drishti has given test engineers more time to focus on the important stuff – why products fail. They don't spend as much time investigating one-off incidents, instead they've started to understand patterns and repetition in testing events. And they do it all now more efficiently.

As a result, the company sees new products moving through testing phases much faster, which speeds new product introduction. And when products get to market faster, the virtuous cycle of revenue and market share accelerates.

In short, Drishti helped this manufacturer:

  • Exceed quality expectations of customers
  • Speed new product introduction (NPI)
  • Increase market share