Customer Success Story: Astro Lighting

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As a fast-growing company, Astro introduces over 200 new products a year. With a growing product line, maintaining all the data for each product was becoming difficult and time-consuming. “Our product specifications were held in a variety of places including an Access® database, Word® documents, and Excel® spreadsheets,” said Stuart Wells, Head of Product Development. “Our distributors need a lot of technical information when quoting a new job. We had to manually collate the information from various sources into a spreadsheet to give to our distributors. This process was very difficult and time-consuming.” At the time, Wells was responsible for the introduction of new products, from concept to completion. “We recognized that there must be a better way to store and access our data. In addition, I had created a giant spreadsheet to help control the critical path for the entire new product development process. Unfortunately, this was cumbersome to use and maintain.”

Astro Lighting, founded in 1997, is a leading British designer and producer of contemporary lighting supplied predominantly to architects, designers, and specifiers. The company has grown on average 20 percent year-on-year thanks to its insistence on only the highest levels of design, quality, and customer service. Today, Astro exports to over 70 countries. With newly established Asian and US subsidiaries, the company is strengthening its position as a global brand. Astro Lighting has 83 employees and operates from locations in the United Kingdom, Singapore, and the United States. The company specializes in residential interior and external lighting products.

Driven by the company’s new CEO, Wells started looking for software to address the issues Astro was facing with organizing large amounts of product data. At the time, Astro was working with an IT consultant who recommended they evaluate Autodesk’s PLM software, Fusion Lifecycle. “We sat down with Autodesk and explained our requirements. The subsequent demonstration showed us that Fusion Lifecycle was exactly what we were looking for. Furthermore, it included other capabilities that we hadn’t considered could be included as part of the system, such as revision control.” said Wells. Formalizing the new product introduction process was a key requirement for Astro. “We have 8 engineers working on over 200 new products a year,” said Wells. “We had a workflow, but it was held entirely in the minds of our engineers. Nothing was formalized or mapped out. We knew what needed to be done to move a product from A to B, but it was easy to overlook a crucial step. Also, for new employees it was important to have a workflow that they could understand and follow. Fusion Lifecycle provides a graphical representation of the new product introduction process, promoting a faster understanding of the duties of both the individual and team.”

• Fusion Lifecycle provides Astro with the visibility they were lacking as well as helping Wells manage his department more efficiently. “Fusion Lifecycle’s dashboard provides me with a quick overview of the workload in my department. I can easily see which engineers are working on what products. With Fusion Lifecycle, I can drill down into the detail of each workflow. I have a much clearer picture of the current status of a product in the development process, helping to quickly identify and resolve potential bottlenecks. Fusion Lifecycle makes it easier to allocate a new product to the right engineer. I can make sure that senior engineers are working on the more complicated products.”
• Another area where Fusion Lifecycle has proved to be a time-saver is management reporting. “Every time there is a board meeting we provide information regarding the status of the new products in development,” said Wells. “Before Fusion Lifecycle, we would spend a couple of days running around to gather the information, now it’s instantaneous.”
• Fusion Lifecycle has helped Astro’s design engineers increase productivity. “Our design engineers typically work on multiple products at the same time. In addition, there are a lot of interruptions with support calls. One minute an engineer is working on a design, the next talking to a customer. Fusion Lifecycle helps engineers manage many different tasks during the day. Because of Fusion Lifecycle, the process is formalized and engineers don’t have to rely on their memory exclusively. We are now developing the same number of products, but the products today are far more complicated and sophisticated. Without Fusion Lifecycle it would have been difficult to keep up with demand without increasing staff,” said Wells.

• Astro started implementing Fusion Lifecycle during October 2014 with 12 users. Today, there are 31 users across a wide range of disciplines.
• Astro Lighting has grown on average 20 percent year-on-year.