WMDevices Scales Up In-House & Contract Manufacturing with Aligni
WMDevices prides itself on developing and manufacturing music hardware – including modular synthesizers, guitar pedals, and stand-alone musical instruments – of the highest quality, with an emphasis on features and versatility.
To ensure product quality, WMDevices created its own surface-mount technology manufacturing factory in Denver, Colorado. The quality of the products and capabilities of the factory have attracted other music device developers. WMDevices has become the premier contract manufacturer in the music hardware industry and now manufactures, warehouses, and fulfills retail-ready, packaged products for 25 companies, with distribution worldwide.
“Stop the line. We ran out of parts!”
As WMDevices grew, it became clear that Excel spreadsheets weren’t able to provide the flexibility, collaboration capability, or accuracy to manage their multi-line factory.
“In the past, before we could start a production run, someone would have to physically run over and get the parts, then order up more if we needed them,” said William Mathewson, President and lead engineer of WMDevices. “We started off using Aligni’s master parts database – what we have and where it is in the warehouse – this was essential for our ability to scale our business.”
Aligni saves us time, makes us more accurate, and has made us a lot faster at providing quotes.
William Mathewson, President and Main Engineer, WMDevices
Aligni is built for multi-site teams managing thousands of parts. For WMD:
- 3200+ parts
- 500+ assemblies
- 1600+ builds
- 50 in-house products
- 100 products as contract manufacturer for 25 companies
- Engineering Change Orders
- Purchase Orders
- Supplier Quote Requests (RFQs)
WMDevices is not yet using all the features of Aligni. As with many new Aligni users, they are rolling out critical modules over time, starting with the Aligni master parts database. “There is a lot of legacy information in our system, and we are working our way up to having everything managed in Aligni,” Mathewson said. “Over time, we want Aligni to handle everything, including all document and revision control, so that Aligni will be the ‘single source of truth,’ for the entire system.”
Aligni has made it possible for us to run twice as many jobs, in parallel, with fewer mistakes!
William Mathewson, President and Main Engineer, WMDevices
WMD is able to scale with Aligni because Aligni:
- Saves time.
- Allows for accurate manufacturing planning (no more part outages).
- Enables multiple projects manufactured in parallel, without running out of parts.
Aligni has provided a huge productivity bump and shortened lead times on our deliverables.
William Mathewson, President and Main Engineer, WMDevices
Have you reached your Excel Tipping Point?
Early adoption of Aligni saves significant cost and confusion, freeing up time and resources for innovation.
About WMDevices
WMDevices is a manufacturer of music hardware including Modular Synthesizers, Guitar Pedals, and stand-alone music instruments. Our focus is to create quality products with an emphasis on features and versatility.
More than a brand or a company, we are truly a collection of artists. Each and every one of us make art or music in one way or another. We strive to make products that we would actually use in our everyday musical lives. In order to do this, we run an extensive beta testing program in which potential products get put into rigs of our employees and well-known artists we have grown close to over the years. They go on tour, get recorded and gigged before they hit the market ensuring a powerful, intuitive feature set and top-notch build.