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Case Study:
Improving Returns Analysis Efficiency

A leading manufacturer of small household appliances reduced their failure analysis time from weeks to hours.

Summary
  • A leading global innovator in small household appliances reduced their failure analysis time from weeks to hours and saved over $65K in outsourced scanning in the first year of working with Lumafield.
  • Neptune provides the company with a dedicated, in-house tool capable of managing all of their returns analysis in a fraction of the time they had previously been spending.
  • With a team distributed across North America, Europe, and Asia, and customers across the globe, Voyager enables our customer’s engineers to share and measure returns analysis data collaboratively and in real-time.
Background

Our customer, a publicly traded, global household appliance brand, is deeply committed to enhancing people’s lives at home every day through a lineup of world-class products. Their offerings include dozens of countertop kitchen appliances, a range of high-performance cleaning devices, and a variety of other innovative household tools. With 27 unique product categories responsible for nearly $4B in annual revenue, maintaining world-class quality control represents a constant challenge for the company’s 700+ globally distributed engineers. For many years, their outsourced failure analysis process meant weeks of waiting for answers any time a customer returned a defective product. As rapidly growing sales increased their reliance on outsourced CT scanning, this expensive and inefficient process left many on the engineering team looking for an in-house solution.

Streamlining Returns Analysis
by bringing CT in-house

When the company’s engineering team saw a spike in defective returns of a new vacuum product, they relied on their new Lumafield technology to quickly and accurately conduct failure analysis testing in a high-pressure situation. With a Neptune scanner in-house, they were able to identify the issue same-day and immediately begin working on a fix, saving essential time while honoring their commitment to delivering best-in-class product experiences for their customers.

Lumafield’s technology has helped us to completely overhaul our failure analysis testing and cut out weeks of unnecessary wait time. My team can understand and resolve complex product issues in a matter of hours thanks to their Neptune scanner.

          — Senior Manager of Engineering

Manufacturing defects can be quickly pinpointed using Voyager’s CAD Comparison tool. Above, the CAD model for a vacuum turbine component has been overlaid with the CT scan of the part, and a heat map visualizes deviations between them.
Real-time collaboration
in the Cloud

For a company with a large engineering team, international collaboration is critical when solving complex product-related problems. With the outsourced, legacy CT scanning process they were accustomed to, scan data was traditionally restricted to technicians and almost impossible to share broadly across a globally distributed workforce.

Lumafield's cloud-based Voyager platform, however, gives engineers direct access to their scan data and allows for seamless sharing in a web browser—no additional hardware or software necessary. When a defective product is scanned, colleagues across three continents can quickly leave comments and resolve problems in real-time using Voyager’s user-friendly interface.

We couldn’t be happier with the Neptune scanner. It has been incredibly easy to use and saved us more than $65K on outsourced scanning expenses alone last year. My team loves working with Lumafield’s technology, and we’re excited to utilize CT scanning in more of our product development this year.

          — Senior Manager of Engineering

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