Case Study: Western Digital Corporation achieves continuous, data-driven quality improvement and rapid root-cause detection with Teradata

Obsession with Quality at Western Digital Corporation

Western Digital (WD), a leading hard‑disk manufacturer producing roughly 550,000 drives a day, faced a classic big‑data quality challenge: tiny defect rates translate to millions of potential failures across a complex, fragmented supply chain. Identifying root causes required end‑to‑end traceability across suppliers, factories, tests, shipments and field use, while also controlling warranty costs and enabling fast, accurate responses to customer issues.

WD built the Quality Information System (QIS): a centralized enterprise data warehouse on Teradata fed by ELT pipelines and self‑service analytics (QIS Detail, D3, Spotfire, MS Analysis Services, NPI Express). By integrating millions of sensor and traceability records and giving engineers rapid ad‑hoc and predictive tools, WD cut investigation and containment times from weeks to minutes or days, achieved industry‑leading DPPM and warranty metrics, reduced warranty reserves and recall costs, and supported sustained market‑share growth and stronger OEM relationships.

Western Digital Corporation

Gary Meister

CIO and Senior VP of Customer Satisfaction