SinglePoint Goes LIVE After Successful Pilot at TRW Plant in Sunderland, UK.

TRW Automotive Systems, based in Houghton-le-Spring, Sunderland UK, began their pilot trial of SinglePoint for managing complex engineering change back in December. The trial quickly showed a great deal of promise that the software was capable of being configured to handle all of the various stages of the process which includes detailed data capture and multiple levels of authorization and sign-off.

At the end of May, after one more round of exhaustive testing and user training, the system was declared LIVE and in the first two weeks of June 10 new engineering changes have been entered into the system.

Syncronology's development of the SinglePoint application has received direct customer input from TRW Sunderland. Mike O’Neill is the Quality and Engineering Manager at Houghton and has been a keen supporter and advocate of the system from the very beginning. Senior Quality Engineer Eric Borley has attended several customer forums and has been instrumental in leading the implementation at Sunderland.

Eric explains "We had one of those classic scenarios of having a complex process, in this case for Engineering Change, spread among several departments with multiple people getting involved but all recorded on to one common spreadsheet. Basically nobody knew who had worked on it, who should have been working on it next, what the outstanding tasks were and consequently we needed to run regular lengthy meetings in order to keep on top of things.

“With SinglePoint we now have complete visibility into the tasks and the right people get notified for actions at the right time. Absolute Reporting means we can immediately see the status of an ECR (Engineering Change Request) and we can take action to bring changes in on time”

Eric has been impressed with the flexibility of SinglePoint. "I always regarded our change management process as being pretty complex but SinglePoint has captured every little detail and business rule quite easily."

Feedback from the end users is equally encouraging with everyone reporting positively on its ease of use and the fact that it acts now as a repository for all critical documents such as drawings and reports which are all now uploaded into SinglePoint rather than stored locally by the users.

Mike O'Neil plans to roll out an equally complex process during the remainder of 2008 covering their three key areas of Issues Management; Audit Non-Conformance, Customer Concerns and Health & Safety. One of the biggest attractions of SinglePoint to Mike is the management reporting capabilities presented by the Absolute Reporting module as he will have access to real time business reporting that was previously only available after a substantial manual effort – with SinglePoint that data is simply a couple of mouse clicks away and is always current.

Everyone at Syncronology is excited at the prospect of working with the team at TRW Sunderland in building on this excellent start and to rolling out more successful applications of SinglePoint in the coming months and years.