Celestica has been experiencing increased growth over the past few years, and needed to implement a solution that would help them scale their Quality Management System (QMS) with this growth. Prior to Octave Reliance® (formerly ETQ Reliance), they were using a legacy system that was siloed; each site had to work independently on their processes with little visibility from a global view. In addition, their systems were not integrated with other business processes, which forced their users to manually input data from other system, affecting efficiency and data integrity. Celestica set out to find a solution that would enable them to centralize their Quality Management System, provide them with visibility into data from all sites, and integrate with their various business systems to provide transparency in their view of quality. This led them to Reliance.
Filling the gap
Through Reliance, Celestica was able to implement several modules that would help them to match their business processes exactly, in a flexible and user friendly manner. Through the use of the Enterprise Configuration Center in Reliance, the organization is able to set up locations by their sites, and create groups that would be able to operate each site, in a single environment. This way, they can assign processes more efficiently, track any nonconforming materials, link to other business systems for more information, and streamline the overall process.
Through Reliance, Celestica dramatically streamlined the nonconformance process, with modules to identify the nonconformance, link to Suppliers and Materials, record any Deviations in place, and track the entire process from start to finish.
Meeting the need
Reliance has provided Celestica with several key benefits in helping them globalize and standardize their Quality Management System:
Global, scalable solution
The most important part of the solution is that this is a truly global application that puts all of their quality processes and people into one application. This enables Celestica to build common processes that allows them to have one consistent level of quality to their customers. The common platform allows for real time collaboration on issues, containment and corrective actions globally that Celestica did not have with their segregated solution. The common platform also allows for visibility into data with tools like enterprise reporting and charting as well as quality alerts that provide the users with real time data and trending of data, which could not previously have been achieved.
Simplified IT infrastructure
By using a common platform, their IT group has been able to simplify their infrastructure landscape. This has allowed Celestica to remove many site-based infrastructures that required support, development and management to maintain. This simplified infrastructure has been a large benefit in supporting Celestica’s IT initiative to move to a simplified structure.
Flexibility
One of the other key benefits is the flexibility in the Reliance platform. This flexibility has allowed Celestica to take the standard solution that was delivered with the product and modify the design with ease to match the quality processes that are followed at Celestica. The flexibility allowed Celestica to build on the existing design and allow them to extend the platform with various integration methods and additional processes to further innovate and expand their use of Reliance.
Ease of integration
Through Reliance, Celestica was able to easily integrate with their other business systems. Integration with their HR systems, ERP system and data warehouses has allowed them to build reliable processes based on solid master data. This has allowed for efficient processes with automation and a high level of data quality. With any QMS it is very important that the data be at a high quality level as it drives changes in their processes, products and relationships with their vendors and customers. Octave Reliance was able to achieve this for Celestica.
Achieving business efficiency
Celestica has gained business efficiency from two key areas as a result of implementing Reliance. The first area is ease of use with the master data, integration and linked forms. Their previous solutions required a large degree of manual input of data, across multiple processes. Since each process was segregated, when the process moved from a nonconformance to a Supplier Corrective Action, all of the data would have to be entered again, manually.
Reliance has allowed Celestica to populate all of the master data and SAP transactional data with the integration between the forms so that the data does not have to be re-entered multiple times. This represented a very large savings of time and money and provided a significant savings in paying engineers to manually enter data, making the efficiencies all the more important. The second efficiency comes from improved quality of data and reporting. In the previous solution, the data needed to be compiled manually for reports, and since much of the data was inputted manually, there was time spent on correcting data input errors.
With the Reliance, the reporting is automated, which reduces the dependency on more manual reporting methods, and provides a centralized and more transparent data set.