| San Jose, CA – June 02, 2004 –
Agile Software Corporation (Nasdaq: AGIL), a leading
provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions,
today announced several successful customer implementations
of
Agile Product Service & Improvement (PS&I), which
has enabled improved product quality and customer
satisfaction. Agile PS&I tightly integrates customer,
product, quality and regulatory information within
a closed-loop corrective action system. Innovative
companies spanning multiple countries — Fargo Electronics
in the U.S., Advantech and ADlink in Taiwan and Hitachi
in Japan — are now able to fulfill customer demands
for higher quality, faster response and compliance
with regulatory requirements.
In a March 2004 AMR Research Alert, Michael Burkett
stated, “Profitable growth is the objective for manufacturers
in 2004, requiring speeding innovation that clearly
meets customer needs, while simultaneously designing
for efficient manufacturability. Achieving this requires
capturing information — regarding compliance, quality
assurance and best practices — to a single product
record, allowing for cross-functional teams to work
together in bringing successful products to market.”
Hitachi
Over a year ago, the Information & Telecommunications
Systems business unit of Hitachi, Ltd., a leading
global electronics company, extended the length of
its product warranty of its personal computers from
one year to three years. This change brought about
the need to improve supporting processes to keep the
warranty costs down and shorten customer response
time. Meeting these goals would require visibility
into the product record and better collaboration between
engineering, manufacturing and sales. Hitachi selected
Agile PS&I to help make this happen. Following the
implementation, the engineering team is now able to
respond more quickly to customer issues and the support
team has access to product details that strengthen
its ability to trouble shoot.
“With Agile PS&I, we have accelerated the process
of product improvement by understanding what our customers
need, communicating it to each team and tying that
information to the product record,” said Koichi Kunimasa,
chief innovation officer, Information & Telecommunications
Systems, Hitachi, Ltd. “We increased our warranty
because we believe in our technology and in our ability
to serve our customers — Agile makes this much easier.”
Fargo
Fargo Electronics, Inc., a leading manufacturer
of personal identification card printing systems,
looked to Agile to improve the performance of Fargo’s
quality management system. Three months following
the implementation of Agile Product Service & Improvement,
quality issues records are now housed in a single,
accessible repository from which metrics can be measured,
issues can be escalated, and customer needs can be
addressed quickly and comprehensively.
“Our quality systems were difficult to manage,
and most importantly — not meeting the needs of our
customers,” said Tom Platner, vice president, engineering
and manufacturing for Fargo. “Since implementing Agile
PS&I, we’ve been able to review a comprehensive knowledge
base of product quality history that helps us take
what we have learned and apply it to, not only current,
but also future designs.”
Advantech
Advantech is a leading global provider of solutions
that enable Internet connectivity in a wide variety
of markets, offering a comprehensive set of over 450
products and solutions, including system integration
hardware, software, and services. The company was
looking to improve the efficiency of its quality management
system, which was not a standard process. This caused
slow responses to customer issues, an inability to
evaluate how the issues were resolved, and no way
to re-use the solutions. Advantech chose Agile PS&I
and has already experienced significant time and cost
savings.
“Our customers hold us to very high expectations
and our Agile implementation helped us to meet these
expectations as well as improve our business,” said
Eric Chen, information technology division director,
Advantech. “We have experienced a 25% decrease in
cycle time, a decrease in warranty costs and an increase
in customer satisfaction.”
ADlink
Headquartered in Taiwan, with design and technology
centers in the US and the Pacific Rim regions, ADlink
is a world-class provider of communications, embedded
computing, test & measurement, and automated solutions.
When the company developed new products, there was
no central database or record tracking product quality.
Design times were much longer because teams were not
able to access previous work, and therefore had to
recreate each design from the beginning. A great deal
of time was also spent tracking down product information
that was located in various systems across the enterprise,
such as the customer relationship management (CRM)
and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications.
“Agile PS&I has enabled us to raise the bar on
the quality for our new product designs,” said Dianne
Ni, senior director, ADLink. “Better quality means
happier customers and lower warranty costs — two key
factors that affect our bottom line.”
“We are pleased with the momentum that Agile Product
Service and Improvement is gaining in the market,”
said Jay Fulcher, Agile president and COO. “Agile
PS&I is enabling companies like Hitachi, Fargo, ADlink
and Advantech to fulfill their customer demands for
higher quality and faster response while also helping
them to improve their bottom line.”
About Agile Software Corporation
Agile Software Corporation (NASDAQ: AGIL) helps
companies drive profits, accelerate innovation, reduce
costs, and ensure regulatory compliance throughout
the product lifecycle. With a broad suite of enterprise-class
PLM solutions, time-to-value focused implementations,
and a unique
Guaranteed Business Results
program, Agile helps companies get the most from their
products. Alcatel, Boeing, Dell Inc., Flextronics
International, Hitachi, Leapfrog, Lockheed Martin,
Magna Steyr, Siemens, QUALCOMM and ZF are
among the nearly 1200 customers in the automotive,
aerospace and defense, consumer products, electronics,
high tech, industrial products, and life sciences
industries that use Agile solutions. For more information,
call 408-284-4000 or visit
www.agile.com.
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