Sector Electronics - Electronic Product Design

Problem

A major medical company required a monitoring system to aid in the servicing and maintenance of large magnets used for mobile MRI systems. Loss of cryogens could result in damages as high as $300,000 per incident.

Their own service department had started the design but after 3 years, was unable to bring the design to production.

Solution

Sector performed a preliminary project evaluation to identify problem areas in hardware design, documentation, firmware and various certifications (FCC, CE).

Sector found that the past project delays were related to the existence of many competing specification requirements, wish-lists for functionality, and the projects impact on multiple areas of the company's operation that had to be understood and coordinated. As the independent design leader, Sector was able to communicate openly with the various interest groups to define all open design issues and negotiate with these groups so that the resultant design would satisfy most of their needs.

With the design issues listed and identified, the next step was the development of a draft operating specification. With this tool, we were able to develop consensus between the various competing groups. This document became somewhat of a "Living" specification during a period of a few months, but was finalized and later became the guiding requirement. Once the specification was initiated, it was possible to focus on completing project tasks.

Our major Project Management assignment was to utilize and coordinate various engineering disciplines within the client company and to insure that outside engineering skill sets were available to the project from outside the client company's assigned personnel. In addition to direct vendor management for all sub-contracted activities, various other tasks that we were responsible for were electronic design, environmental testing, firmware development, modem communications, coordination with world-wide telephony networks, adaptation to existing Global service software, detailed documentation (schematics, assemblies, PCB layouts, operating manuals, service manual, sub-specifications) and many other similar type tasks.

We developed and maintained project schedules; task lists and chaired regular meetings with different personnel within the company's task teams over the course of the project.

Within a period of 9 months the project was in clinical trials at 5 locations worldwide and, after another 3 months, all systems were in place to begin full production.

During the product rollout phase, Sector provided personnel training on the operation of the device and assisted the service group in determining the various failure modes and appropriate corrective actions.

The completed product performed such functions as monitoring multiple temperatures in the single digit Kelvin range, helium pressure, water flow, water temperature, interlock status and also provided other functionality as follows; remote connection, remote software upgrades, compatibility with local laptop computers for service personnel, capabilities to act as a web server on local intranets, use of multiple alarms for both local and remote communication, magnet controls by means of circuitry and firmware to regulate helium pressure, communications to facilitate various emergency shut-down modes and maintain internal logs of all transactions and data collected for long term reporting purposes.

To our knowledge there are over 2000 of these monitors deployed to date, supporting the service organization of that company.