Teradyne’s Innovation Backbone

The video above highlights some key takeaways from a presentation by Bill Duggan, director of PLM at Teradyne. The company is a leading supplier of test equipment. Bill presented at this event with CIO Chuck Ciali. Chuck shared some of the products his company does testing on and I wondered if they could play off Intel’s Inside ads and put “Teradyne Tested” on many of the products you use every day. The car I drive receives Teradyne diagnostic testing at the dealer. The MP3 player I listen to had its cell processor tested by Teradyne.

For those of you who may not have YouTube access to view the video, Bill reviews how his company has made PLM the backbone of innovation to improve products, profit and customer satisfaction. He highlights how they view their savings from PLM into strategic, soft and hard savings. Finally he shares his biggest lesson learned from a large scale PLM implementation.

In the presentation, Bill equated their PLM implementation to the “Big Dig” in Boston (where the company is HQ’d).

 

“You have to keep traffic going while swapping out infrastructure.”

They are about half-way through an 8-step, four-year process.

Teradyne leveraged Teamcenter to consolidate into one engineering documentation vault:

 

• 14 sources of data

 

• 370,000 active parts

 

• 563,000 design documents

This enabled them to reduce lead times from 2-3 months to less than 5 days.

Some lessons learned:

 

• develop a multi-year plan and assume PLM as a strategic enterprise platform for full ROI

 

• drive accountability for hard cost savings

 

• govern the program like any R&D program

 

• have strong executive sponsorship