Promex Achieves Product and Quality Excellence in Contract Manufacturing

Business challenges

Building intricate electronic systems smaller than 1 mm requires precision, technical expertise, and information integrity. Promex must consistently assemble products to the right specifications and follow compliant practices to meet customers’ quality, cost, and delivery expectations.

Early on, Promex did not have a single repository to manage product information and implement changes. Build documentation, customer correspondences, compliance evidence, and other key records were maintained via spreadsheets, paper, local drives, and emails. Essentially, information was disconnected and difficult to find.

It took several days to push engineering change notifications (ECNs) through the approval cycle. Engineering change orders (ECOs) were recorded on paper and sequentially routed to each stakeholder for review and approval, resulting in a cumbersome and time-consuming process. “Because our document control manager was the sole person handling ECOs, we encountered delays whenever she was out of the office. Everything came to a halt since we didn’t have full visibility into the status of changes,” stated Jonathan Cruz, IT and Database Manager at Promex.

These manual processes and disparate systems made it difficult for Promex to efficiently get products through to production. Hence, they set out to find an enterprise product lifecycle management (PLM) system that could streamline engineering changes and allow for better control and tracking of information throughout the entire lifecycle.

The solution

After evaluating several PLM solutions, Promex selected Arena because it was affordable, easy to implement, and highly configurable.

Arena PLM centralizes Promex’s product information and quality management processes in a secure, cloud-native platform. From bills of materials (BOMs), supplier lists, and assembly instructions to engineering changes and quality records—everything is connected. Automatic change processes and revision controls are applied to items, BOMs, and documents, ensuring that everyone always works from the right revision.

Promex’s teams can securely access Arena and quickly see the status of ECOs and other open items via a convenient dashboard. Since ECOs are automatically routed to stakeholders all at once, Promex can expedite the review and approval process and implement changes faster. Moreover, they can use Arena’s filtering and search capabilities to quickly retrieve information for audits and other sustaining activities.

By linking CAPAs, nonconformances, complaints, and other quality processes directly to the product BOM, Arena provides Promex full traceability and visibility into quality issues that impact the product. This connected quality management approach helps the company streamline compliance with ISO and other quality standards.

Arena also supports Promex’s compliance with ITAR through its multilayered security model and robust access controls.

Results

Arena now serves as the single source of truth for Promex to efficiently manage product information and quality processes. They have been able to implement Arena using a phased approach and gradually acclimate everyone to the system.

All departments use Arena’s core capabilities including BOM management, engineering change management, quality management, and project management as part of their daily work routine:

• Operations, sales, and engineering retrieve and upload new procedures to Arena.
• Materials and production teams pull assembly instructions directly from Arena to ensure they are always working from the latest revision.
• The quality team leverages Arena’s Quality module to create all the processes (e.g., complaints, nonconforming materials, internal audits, management reviews) and associated records that support their quality management system (QMS). They set up specific criteria for each process to ensure compliance with regulatory standards. “Having all our compliance evidence up to date and readily accessible in Arena helps to simplify our audits,” stated Songlin Li, Quality Manager at Promex.
• The engineering team uses the Project module to keep track of action items and customer communications for each project. “Arena serves as our checklist to ensure that we have all the right information at every phase of the project,” stated Dave Fromm, Chief Operating Officer at Promex. “We’re able to document and review the lessons learned from each project and drive continuous improvement.”
• Employees access training records from Arena as part of their onboarding and ongoing performance development.

In the future, Promex plans to integrate Arena with their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to help streamline inventory parts management and supplier management.

With all their information fully digitized and connected, Promex can continue their successful journey toward revolutionizing microelectronics assembly and achieving quality excellence.