Data Warehousing, Enterprise Intranet Architecture

The Client

Western Digital Corporation is a leader in hard drive manufacturing for desktop computers and home entertainment electronic products. Western Digital’s hard drives comprise more than 200 components manufactured by outside suppliers, and the company manufactures more than 100,000 units per day at its plant in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Western Digital’s headquarters are in Irvine, California, with additional facilities in San Jose, California. They have more than 7,000 employees and approximately $2 billion in annual revenues.

The Challenge

The globalization of the hard drive industry has increased competition and reduced product life cycles, which has eroded profit margins across the industry. Western Digital needed to find new ways to reduce product development costs, improve quality, and deliver effective customer service.

Like any electro-mechanical product, every hard drive has the potential to fail. Western Digital needed to be able to trace each hard drive it manufactured through its entire life cycle—from manufacturing and testing to shipment and returns—to determine root causes of failure, and to use this information to improve future products.

Western Digital’s quality systems were housed on various legacy platforms. Despite rigorous implementation of quality-focused business processes, these systems did not always permit quality issues to be quickly quantified and contained. Conducting root cause analysis for failed hard drives required spending too much time locating the appropriate data—time better spent analyzing the data and making informed strategic decisions.

The Solution

Western Digital recognized the importance of gathering and storing quality-related data in one, accessible repository. Powerful, easy-to-use data mining capabilities were also needed to quickly detect failure patterns and root causes. Working with BearingPoint, Western Digital decided to design and develop the first data warehousing application of its kind.

BearingPoint began by developing functional requirements, collecting and analyzing manufacturing data, and developing enterprise intranet architecture. Working closely together, Western Digital’s IT experts and the BearingPoint project team developed the Quality Information System (QIS), which combined elements of electronic commerce, customer relationship management, data warehousing, and integrated data from a dozen disparate systems.

The Benefits

One of the most valuable aspects of QIS is the system’s ability to provide online analytical processing. From their Web browsers, Western Digital staff can query the data warehouse and analyze results in minutes. With comprehensive product and component information at their fingertips, managers can focus their efforts on analyzing the information and use it to make critical business decisions that deliver enhanced customer service.

Already, QIS has provided strong, quantifiable return on investment (ROI) for Western Digital. The ability to pinpoint individual component-level defects before products are shipped to the customer, as well as trace back the cause of failures in the field, has been invaluable to the company. Most important of all, QIS provides Western Digital with closed loop feedback mechanisms that allow the company to address today’s quality issues and positively impact tomorrow’s business performance.
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