ABCO Automation acortó los ciclos de diseño en un 35% con SOLIDWORKS PDM
ABCO Automation, Inc. diseña y construye sistemas personalizados de automatización de fábrica llave en mano que permiten a los fabricantes de todo el mundo, incluidos 3M, Goodyear, GE y Coca-Cola, superar los desafíos de fabricación para lograr la excelencia. La empresa se ha ganado la reputación de desarrollar equipos de automatización de alta calidad para superar desafíos difíciles en plazos de entrega cada vez más cortos.
En 2010, ABCO agregó el sistema de administración de datos de productos (PDM) SOLIDWORKS® PDM Professional para automatizar el uso del software de diseño SOLIDWORKS 3D y los procesos de desarrollo relacionados para respaldar el crecimiento continuo, ajustar los controles de revisión, acortar los ciclos de diseño y reducir los costos.
Window to product development
The SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional system quickly provided ABCO with a greater understanding of its operations and enabled the company to automate workflows, both within and outside of engineering. The company was able to realize productivity gains by shortening design cycles by 35 percent, speeding time to market by 25 percent, reducing development costs by 20 percent, and cutting costs related to scrap and waste. reprocessing by 55 percent. Additionally, ABCO achieved an additional 5 percent in company-wide efficiency improvements.
«We have developed several methods to extract design data from the SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional software system and use it for other purposes,» explains ABCO CAD Administrator Michael Sveda. “For example, we bring data from our PDM system into our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to support associated business functions, and we use Microsoft® SQL Server Reporting Services to drill down into PDM’s SQL database and collect that data to generate reports. By leveraging our PDM and ERP systems in this way, we can provide a window to the precise status of any part, assembly or project, at any point in the process. »
Automating Workflows, BOM Generation, and Purchasing
With SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional, ABCO has also expanded its workflow automation into other areas, such as changing to a customer’s revision scheme when it differs from ABCO’s, automating the generation of bills of materials (BOMs), and making quoting and purchasing more efficient.
“We created some Microsoft Excel macros that access the raw data in SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional and use it to generate the final BOM information in a format that uploads into our ERP system cleanly and notifies our purchasing agent,” Sveda points out. «In addition to realizing a 50 to 60 percent efficiency improvement in BOM generation, these data mining capabilities make it much easier and faster to order parts, saving additional time and money.»
Reusing Standardized Parts
Every system ABCO develops is a specialized, one-off solution engineered to order, so the potential for design reuse is somewhat limited. Nevertheless, with SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional, ABCO can identify parts common to most of its systems, so when a need is recognized as similar to systems the company has developed in the past, PDM enables engineers to save time by accessing the old design data for use as a springboard into a new design.
With its proven reputation for delivering dependable, effective solutions that provide customers with a competitive edge by reducing costs and increasing productivity, ABCO’s repeat client base exceeds 90 percent. Click here for the complete ABCO case study.
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