Redesigning the documentation process to streamline the process flow in the field and improve the overall customer experience

Abstract

Waters Corporation is a leading company in analytical instruments that has been continuously growing and expanding for the past several years. With the number of installed instruments increasing, the company is dealing with more and more data and failures information that it needs to manage and handle in order to drive action. However, the current failure reporting structure, and more generally the field documentation, do not contribute in making this process simple. Field failures are not well reported, the failure documentation reporting is time consuming so documents are not filled in on-site, and failed parts are not always sent back to perform root cause analyses. This thesis project tackles these problems and presents a software system as a potential solution to be implemented in order to save time, trend the information reported from the field, solve the failures and problems faced, improve product robustness and ultimately, improve customer experience. Furthermore, this thesis suggests next steps that Waters can follow in order to pursue this project until complete effectiveness of the proposed software system is achieved.