Case Study: Western Digital Corporation achieves continuous, data-driven quality and rapid root-cause resolution with TIBCO Software

Obsession with Quality at Western Digital Corporation

Western Digital (WD), a global leader in hard disk drive manufacturing that produces roughly 550,000 drives per day and employs ~63,000 people, faced a complex quality challenge: millions of parts, thousands of test points, fragmented data across suppliers, factories, shipping and field service, and costly warranty returns. Root causes often arose from subtle combinations of components, processes and customer environments, so WD needed fast, reliable traceability and analytics to avoid shipping defects and to manage warranty exposure.

WD built the Quality Information System (QIS): a centralized enterprise data warehouse on Teradata that ingests lifecycle data and powers self-service and advanced analytics (QIS Detail, D3, Spotfire, Microsoft Analysis Services, NPI Express). The result was dramatic — far faster detection and surgical containment of defects (e.g., pinpointing affected serials in minutes or seconds), lower warranty costs and reserves, industry-leading low defect rates (reported ~1.9 DPPM), stronger OEM customer loyalty, and a material contribution to WD’s market-share growth from ~12% to over 31%.

Western Digital Corporation

Gary Meister

CIO and Senior VP of Customer Satisfaction