Aptia Case Study - Custom Software Solution for Capital Equipment QA Screening

Despite its own stringent quality assurance program, a major oil and gas company experienced over $500 million in lost time and revenue when a newly acquired piece of equipment failed to perform its basic task. Blame could be placed on the original vendor for poor quality assurance, but if the purchasing company had been able to prescreen the product with its own quality assurance program, the loss could have been avoided. The client asked Aptia Systems to provide a custom software solution to help standardize quality assurance for major capital projects across the entire organization.

Aptia’s Custom Software Solution: Central Prescreen Quality Management Program

Aptia Systems provided an economical, scalable software solution to meet the client’s need to better control its business operations and reduce costs associated with critical equipment failure.

We designed and built the first and third (of three) phases of the Central Prescreen Quality Management Program. The first phase allowed the company to design entire quality assurance processes and share the processes between business units. Business units were able to create projects and documentation from existing, standardized, working processes, and then further modify those processes as needed.

In keeping with an unpopular trend in American business, the company later moved its information technology operations offshore and contracted with a company in India for development of Phase Two of the program. A year later, the frustrated company contacted Aptia once again, this time to undo the confusion created by the offshore contractor. After reviewing the situation and the client’s requirements, we spent 7% (based on actual hours provided by the company) of the time contracted by the offshore company to rewrite and successfully implement the third phase of the program.

Features and Benefits

• Concise data driven system relies on easy to use, electronic form-based data entry
• Self-indexing allows quick and accurate cross referencing to relevant data
• User-friendly system with simple functions for implementation of updates and modifications
• Data model awareness with self-monitoring of its own database
• Intuitive and easy to use even for computer illiterates

Aptia Systems, Inc., 2500 Tanglewilde, Suite 300, Houston, TX 77063 - [T] 713.458.1070