Client Background

• Client: Drägerwerk AG & Co. KGaA
• Industry: Medical Devices and Safety Equipment
• Service Line: Industry 4.0

Ambition

The increased complexity of modern medical devices has driven market leaders like Dräger to increase their cross-discipline collaboration to improve transparency and ensure compliance with evolving regulatory requirements. By taking such steps, Dräger can maintain or accelerate the speed with which it brings new products to market.

Successfully managing the escalating complexity of the design, development, qualification, and manufacturing of medical products is of the utmost importance to Dräger. An important prerequisite for attaining a fluid environment is maintaining a granular level of traceability across the product value chain.

To address this challenge, Dräger sought to develop a reliable digital thread across their product value chain that would enable end-to-end traceability. They decided to pursue an Enterprise Data Dependency Management (EDDM) platform that was “technology neutral” and could be expanded to include all enterprise systems in Dräger’s product development landscape. This landscape would include a diverse mix of processes and tools from multiple vendors.

Action

Dräger selected Wipro as a partner for its complex EDDM implementation due to three key attributes: Wipro’s experience integrating application lifecycle management (ALM) and product lifecycle management (PLM), its readiness to deploy open services for lifecycle collaboration (OSLC) adaptors, and its alignment with Dräger’s approach and vision.

Wipro swiftly assembled a cross-disciplinary team comprised of architects, designers, developers, and testers by leveraging its Topgear platform. The team began by establishing guiding principles for a consistent user experience, better performance, and platform reliability with sufficient redundancy. This diverse expertise, coupled with collaboration with Dräger’s professionals, filled both a technical and a staffing gap to architect a robust technology solution for EDDM that included:

• An open standards-based approach to overcome the shortcomings of proprietary technology-based digital thread solutions that do not scale well in accommodating evolving scope.
• Data-linking capabilities built following the OSLC standard to enable a cross-platform digital thread.
• A scalable framework that can be extended to a heterogenous enterprise landscape.
• A rich UI for link editing.
• A link baseline for capturing the state of dependencies at different milestones during the product lifecycle, as well as asynchronous link maintenance for tracking the link status and replication.

Ambitions Realized

Since its EDDM rollout, Dräger has been able to track and trace engineering artifacts such as product requirements, system architecture, test plans, and test cases, and can access the same without users leaving their application. The granular traceability that EDDM provides, along with its depth and level of detail, helps to increase overall productivity.