Engineering

A manufacturer approached RCOR with the goal of improving their ability to analyze and report on failures of a complex engineered product. The manufacturer repairs broken units and uses failure reports to help improve the original design and predict future expenditures. They had been using Excel pivot tables to analyze their database and prepare summary reports, but the process was time-consuming and there were concerns about data integrity. One of the main issues with the manufacturer's raw data was that their failure database had a date column, but not a month column. This made it difficult to plot bar charts that tracked repairs by month. The manufacturer had been using formulas to group the data into months, but this solution was not dynamic and required a series of separate calculations for different products and failure modes. To address this issue, RCOR developed a solution that automatically added a column to the initial database that categorized each entry by month. This made it easier for the manufacturer to build pivot tables and aggregate data in any way of interest. RCOR also ensured that all pivot tables in the workbook would refresh whenever viewed and employed macros so that users could filter multiple tables with a single action. This allowed the manufacturer to compare different products side-by-side. Overall, the solution developed by RCOR has helped the manufacturer save time and improve the accuracy of their analysis and reporting on failures of their complex engineered product.