I had the chance to talk with … a couple of vendors this year about Quality Lifecycle Management, or QLM. I posted earlier about What I Learned: Expanding PLM’s Pervue – Quality and Risk Management and promised to follow up with some more detail on the vendors. Here are my thoughts on my conversations with Dyadem. 
One early caveat is that Dyadem – while they support the QLM approach to quality – refers to themselves as a “Quality Risk Management” solution provider as opposed to QLM.
What do they Do?
Dyadem has used the terms “Risk Lifecycle Management” in addition to “Quality Risk Management” and QLM to describe what they do. In my conversations with them, I have found they are very thoughtful about what they call their solution. What is common to the descriptions I have heard from them are the terms “risk” and “quality.” Why? Because risk and quality are intrinsically tied together. Poor quality management results in excess costs, a very hard metric to get a handle on. Poor quality also opens companies up to significant risks in the market – from poor customer perception, high repair/warranty/replacement costs, or from potentially catastrophic results of product failure leading to legal action.
So Dyadem helps companies reduce the cost and risk of poor quality. How? For one thing, Dyadem tries to help companies learn from their repeated errors. Many quality issues follow a pattern of:
- Create a condition that leads to an error
- Make an error
- Correct the error
- Repeat
What’s missing? Learning from the error, and changing the underlying condition that led to the problem. I know this doesn’t sound like rocket science, but it is probably the core element of QLM – and one that is dreadfully missing in most manufacturing companies today. Corrective action needs to be applied to the underlying condition as opposed to the error itself. This is what the quality “lifecycle” is all about – feeding the cause of errors back to engineering so they can be designed out of products and/or manufacturing processes.
What do they Offer?
In short, Dyadem offers solutions that help companies identify their errors and put in place quality and risk management processes. Identifying errors comes from analysis of manufacturing and quality data. By crunching the numbers coming from the underlying manufacturing systems (such as ERP) they can help identify recurring problems. In addition, Dyadem offers solutions to put in place quality lifecycle processes including:
- Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) – to identify potential and recognized errors and put in place corrective action to prevent them, preferably early in the product design cycle
- Fault Tree Analysis – to identify potential hazards that can lead to an error
- Process Hazard Analysis – to identify risks or hazards based on processes and put in place prevention measures (an example of this technique is HAZOP)
A trained eye will also notice that most of these techniques are adopted to comply with regulatory mandates in certain industries, as clearly Dyadem helps companies comply with quality and risk management regulations in addition to helping them reduce the cost and risk associated with poor quality.
Who do they Work with?
Dyadem works with discrete manufacturers such as automotive, aerospace, and medical device companies as well as process manufacturers like pharmaceutical companies. In fact, Dyadem offers separate versions of their flagship Stature product for process and discrete as well as some industry flavors of their other solutions, such a their FMEA-Med tool which (not surprisingly) helps medical device companies develop failure modes and effects analysis documents, which are important for FDA validation.
So that’s what I hear from Dyadem, I hope you found it useful. What do you think? Is quality a missing link in PLM? What else should I have asked them?