Innovative development at Endress+Hauser with a product development tracker

About the customer

Endress+Hauser is an international company specializing in the development and manufacture of measuring instruments, automation technology and services for various industries. Endress+Hauser offers a wide range of products and solutions for process automation, particularly in the fields of measurement and control technology, analytical technology, flow measurement, level measurement and process recording and monitoring.

The project

At Enderess+Hauser, every newly developed product goes through an extensive workflow before it is released for sale. This process extends over a period of 12 to 18 months and comprises 46 steps, which are completed in five successive phases.

Various tasks need to be completed during this development phase. These include the procurement or development of new production resources, the creation of price lists, the development of country-specific sales conditions and the coordination of production and delivery times to ensure that the new products are marketable.

This process is a highly complex and important phase for the company. Its main task is to ensure the first-class quality of the new products so that Endress+Hauser can always offer its customers high-quality products. It is therefore crucial that this process is carried out precisely and that all steps are carefully documented.

Our contribution to the project

In collaboration with Endress+Hauser, we developed a detailed solution design for the product development tracker. The solution was developed based on the skybow Solutions Studio tool, which enabled rapid development and high customizability. Throughout the project, agile collaboration and communication was maintained to ensure that the solution met the requirements and that challenges were identified and addressed early on. The team was flexible and ready to respond to changing customer requirements. Particular emphasis was placed on a user-friendly interface and smooth performance. Continuous testing and feedback loops ensured the quality and reliability of the developed solution.

Structure of the product development tracker

1. automatically create dynamic tasks‍

The product development tracker automatically creates a dossier with the necessary tasks and assigns them to the appropriate people based on the process configuration and workflow type. This is made possible through the use of skybow Dossiers and Automation Actions, which allow easy creation of master-detail relationships and the linking of multiple lists and libraries, as well as the automatic creation of elements using dynamic variables.

2. intelligent messages

The team receives timely reminders of their tasks and personalized instructions via email or Microsoft Teams messages, using standard automation actions such as "send email" and "send message" that can be easily personalized and customized without programming.

3. workflow tracking‍

The product development tracker enables transparent tracking of the product status during the workflow, which is important both for audits and for the team to know which phase a product is in. To ensure that the work steps are carried out in the right order and at the right time, the workflows are mapped in such a way that only the relevant forms are processed per step.

4. user-defined forms

The forms for documenting the checks in the individual steps were customized using the skybow form designer, with a focus on functions such as conditional formatting, action buttons and individual styling. As a result, only the fields and automation actions relevant to the current step are visible and activated, avoiding errors and guiding users seamlessly through the Product Sales Release Tracker workflow.

The solution is well thought out and offers exactly the functions we need. The team also offers excellent support. You can tell every day that the tool was developed by real M365 experts. I can only recommend it for any M365 project.

Dieter Jauslin

Expert for the digital workplace, Endress+Hauser

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