How smaller manufacturing companies are taking control of their product data – Part 2: Easier access and improved collaboration
from guest blogger David Chadwick
In last week’s post in this series I discussed the findings of a new whitepaper from Jim Brown of Tech-Clarity “The business benefits of product data management: Achieving rapid and extendable benefits” and focused on the first of three themes that Jim identified as having a significant impact on the manufacturing organizations that he interviewed – getting control of product data.
This post focuses on the second and third themes of the whitepaper: improving the ability to quickly find and reuse data, and then sharing this product knowledge to improve collaboration. All of the companies that Jim interviewed found that improving their ability to find the correct data quickly, and improving their reuse of proven components in new designs had a significant impact on their business. Here are a few quotes from these companies that describe the problems they faced and the benefits they are achieving:
Mr. Arun Gupta, Head of Design Engineering at Flovel Engineering, a manufacturer of hydro power equipment:
“Without PDM, Engineering can’t find information and the next engineer might be repeating the same job… we want to make information available to everyone, including technical catalogues, standard technical information, and quality standards… searching this information is very quick with PDM”
Mr. Pinakin Mate, CEO of Veeraja Industries, a manufacturer of coolant filtration and management systems:
“All of our products are custom, and we realized we were reinventing the wheel with each one”
Both of these companies use Teamcenter Express to improve their ability to search for and share product data and have been able to decrease the amount of non-productive time that their designers spend in tasks like searching for data and recreating designs. Their designers have more time to focus on innovation and adding value, improving their time to market and profitability.PDM also helps make the right information available across the business. Purchasing and Manufacturing depend on the data from Engineering to play their role in developing and delivering profitable products.
Mr. Gupta of Flovel
“We had to have strong systems so that we could quickly design products and make accurate data available to Manufacturing”
Teamcenter Express incorporates industry leading Teamcenter Visualization capabilities that render 3D models from multiple CAD systems into portable, lightweight files that can be easily viewed and analyzed by these other departments, and by external resources such as suppliers and customers.
In the final post of this series I will discuss how manufacturing organizations can quickly achieve value from the implementation of product data management software.
Read the full whitepaper or listen to a podcast summary for more information on how to achieve rapid and extendable benefits from PDM.
About David Chadwick
David Chadwick works for Siemens PLM Software and is responsible for global product marketing for Teamcenter Express, a software solution that enables manufacturing companies to quickly take control of their product data.
