From Users for Users

The medical innovations that have taken place since then are in no way inferior to those in automobile manufacturing, aviation and IT. Things we take for granted today would have seemed like magic to people back in 1918. That said, medical progress has gone hand in hand with rapidly increasing regulatory requirements for medical technology companies. This has created significant challenges for manufacturers in this industry, from the product development stage all the way to final quality assurance, as companies have to ensure not only high quality, adherence to the standards for their products, and reliable processes in production and testing. They also need to be able to trace everything, with no gaps in-between. To avoid mountains of paper and the accumulation of information on an endless number of drives, Olympus Surgical Technologies Europe relies on the ZEISS PiWeb solution to manage the quality data in its Quality Laboratory. The laboratory uses the ZEISS database to save all inspection plans and measurement data associated with production development, and to create analyses and reports. The result has been a massive increase in data and process reliability, significant cost and time savings, and new possibilities to document things. It has turned audits from being a nerve-wracking experience to child’s play.

As Olympus Surgical Technologies Europe had already been using several ZEISS devices, including coordinate measurement systems (CMS), and ZEISS software for many years, the company quickly focused on ZEISS PiWeb. ZEISS presented this software solution for reporting and statistics during the 2018 Control trade fair, and that’s where Jens Biedebach and his team were introduced to ZEISS PiWeb for the first time. They were immediately excited. “At the time, we were looking for a database that could connect all devices, no matter from which manufacturer, including handheld measuring devices, and which we could use to document our inspection plans, measurement results and calibrations, and also run statistical analyses. All that is possible with ZEISS PiWeb. The search for alternative solutions was unsuccessful: “Naturally, we inquired about such a solution with other companies to see if they had something similar,” explains Biedebach, “but they told us that what ZEISS PiWeb offers, they hadn’t even started to develop. That made the decision easy for us.” An important issue during the implementation was connecting all the measurement machines. “A big advantage of ZEISS PiWeb for us is that CMSs from ZEISS work together natively. That’s important because we do a lot of measurements with very tight tolerances,” explains Merle Stiller, Quality Specialist at Olympus Surgical Technologies Europe, who was responsible for the implementation of ZEISS PiWeb. “There’s hardly any other database that harmonizes so well.” Another important consideration was the ability to connect to the measurement equipment of third-party manufacturers, including the different handheld measurement devices that are used for interfaces. As a result of this connectivity, Olympus Surgical Technologies Europe was able to integrate its software systems in ZEISS PiWeb. The Quality Laboratory for product-lifecycle management uses Siemens NX with an add-in from a company named neoapps in order to identify features and tolerances. All this could be transferred to ZEISS PiWeb, as well as the approved technical drawings. Information about the testing equipment also has to be provided for every inspection, so the database for inspection equipment, which is in SAP, was implemented in ZEISS PiWeb as well through an API. The protocols, including all digital signatures, are filed in the PLM system ProLIMA and automatically exported to ZEISS PiWeb.

Merle Stiller is pleased that the introduction of ZEISS PiWeb, for which she was mainly responsible, is more or less complete. Even better: in the summer of 2020, the team won a global award from the Japanese Olympus Corporation, beating out all other large change projects that were in the competition. Merle Stiller is entirely satisfied with today’s result: “It‘s fun to work with the software and it’s just great to see what it’s doing for us.” The cooperation with ZEISS was positive throughout the project. “There was also a terrific communication, our wishes were taken into account, and our requirements taken seriously. And whenever something was implemented by ZEISS, they always followed up right away to ask if everything was working OK. This kind of dedication also contributed to our close partnership.” Jens Biedebach agrees: “We were impressed with how ZEISS always had an open ear for us and was always prepared to develop a solution specifically for us. ZEISS is a partner that on the one hand knows its customers and their requirements and on the other hand is always prepared to learn new things together with its customers – that’s a perfect mix and leads to an excellent relationship where you feel really comfortable.” That’s the reason why Olympus Surgical Technologies Europe is expanding the ZEISS PiWeb project. The company has decided on an enterprise license in order to be able to connect more business areas and more geographic locations to ZEISS PiWeb in the future. The data sources of external suppliers and service providers will be able to be integrated too. Furthermore, a global manufacturing execution system (MES) is planned in the future for Olympus as a whole. ZEISS PiWeb will be the central place for data collection and data analysis for this new MES. “Anyone who has experienced the added value of our end-to-end digital system can’t get enough of it,” states Jens Biedebach. “Thanks to ZEISS PiWeb, we have laid a valuable foundation for our future and we will benefit from it for a long time.”