"My experience with BOMLink was excellent. BOMLink in itself is a valuable tool for managing external BOM data on the drawing. If implemented correctly, it can save countless hours in processing and manipulating this data. But like anything else, if it's not properly used the experience can be a bad one that will only fall back on the software vendor, which is not justified in my mind because some individuals may not do diligence in their tasks. We are spoiled in the age of increasing technology to think that any software we purchase will be the answer to all problems by pushing a button. Although this can be true, there is some leg work that has to be done in order to get there. The vendor always takes the fall for someone else's mistakes.
"It's extremely important to have a software system that can manage the BOM data because that is where the company makes their money. If you can't get the right material, Purchasing orders the wrong items, the shop can't build on time, the customer is not satisfied. And in today's market, competition is high. The saying 'do it right the first time' is more than good ethics. The drawing is the controlling document in design and yet from my past experiences, companies (management) don't pay enough attention to this. My personal opinion is that it's because design has evolved from a pencil drawing, something low on the evolutionary scale of management. In those days, and even today, BOMs were created from a different system because there was no other way. As technology has progressed, our mentality has not progressed with it. The high cost of processing data that most companies experience is normally lost in the paper shuffle until someone happens to take the time to reveal the areas that can change it.
"I would highly recommend your software to anyone who wants to improve their productivity in design, purchasing, and manufacturing."
-- Larrey Brown
Dresser Rand
CPG INTERNATIONAL SAP [SQLSERVER 2005] and AutoCAD-2006
Headquartered in Scranton, Pennsylvania, CPG International is a manufacturer of market-leading brands of highly engineered building products for residential and commercial markets designed to replace wood, metal and other traditional materials in a variety of construction applications. The Company’s products are marketed under several brands including AZEK® Trimboards, Santana Products, Comtec Industries, Capitol, EverTuff™, TuffTec™, Hiny Hider® and Celtec®, as well as many other branded products.
The client was referred by SAP reseller Lordi for automating the bill of materials for their COMtec division that builds plastic partitions for Toilet and Shower Compartments, TuffTec Lockers, Vanities, Privacy Screens and Benches. Comtec's engineered to order division struggled with the labor intensive process of sourcing generic and raw material parts for their constantly evolving drawings. The main concern was creating accurate bill of materials for production and purchasing via SAP BizOne. Furthermore, their earlier attempts with in-house developed custom routines were abandoned, leaving behind a repository of 14,000 AutoCAD drawings. The legacy attributed data needed automatic conversion to the new BOMLink system of synchronized and seamless workflow between the AutoCAD drawings and the SAP BizOne business database.
BOMLink was implemented onsite in less than three days with a live and active link to SAP and AutoCAD drawings. The drawings now accurately reflect the inventory items and the quantities and attributes of each line item based on the livelink to SAP. Upon validation and verification, the output is effortlessly released from the assembly drawings to the iBOLT /SAP for downstream orderr processing.
Legacy drawings were replaced with a hotlinks converter to the SAP BizOne with just two clicks of a button. This eliminated an estimated ten thousand hours of manual editing of attributes such as length, width, thickness, qty and color of each of the BOM line items for fabricated parts. The group code incorporated from SAP into BOMLink, split the BOM into several groups such as aluminum, vanity, hardware, etc. ensuring the accurate and timely creation of the traveler directly from the drawings or from SAP.
SHERBROOKE-OEM French ERP (Ipso) [DATAFLEX] and AutoCAD-2006
From its beginnings in 1997, Sherbrooke OEM Ltd. quickly outgrew its 3200 sq. ft building. Today, its shop and offices occupy a modern 25,000 square foot building, with an expanded 15,000 square foot addition. Sherbrooke O.E.M. designs and manufactures a complete line of conveyors for a variety of industrial and environmental applications with special expertise in the wood and recycling industries. Whatever your industry, Sherbrooke O.E.M. can engineer, manufacture and install a system to meet your specific requirements.
This French manufacturer in Quebec is the leading supplier of recycling equipment for most of North America. They struggled with a large AutoCAD staff that primarily managed data manually. They were simultaneously pursuing implementation of an ERP system to automate purchasing and accounting functions. Their number one key requirement was to find an integrated ERP that offered a dynamic link between the AutoCAD with their ERP. Ipso contacted AimaSoft for such integration and within days, following an onsite visit to the customer, reassured the owner of the power of compounding best of breed “engineering data management” with “French friendly ERP system”.
The company projects a conservative savings of $130,000 per year based on an average of 45 minutes of savings per drawing. The company expects that the real savings would be downstream in production and purchasing/shipping which is hard to quantify. They currently create 5000 drawings manually, with projected savings of 3750 hours for a total savings of 128,000 at a loaded cost of $35/hr for the designers. Computing weight for the machines being built, directly on the drawings was a very important criteria since the weight dictated numerous business decisions such as quotes, estimated labor requirement etc. BOMLink was modified in days to incorporate this key milestone of directly calculating these weights based on the Ipso master database.
INDEPENDENCE EXCAVATING (a digeronimo company) ExactMacola [SQLSERVER] and AutoCAD-2007
Independence Excavating is a recognized industry leader in excavation and site development, and is one of Cleveland, Ohio's premier and diversified construction companies. Excavating has evolved into a premier and diversified construction company which still maintains its base operations out of Cleveland, Ohio. IndexC owns and operates over 200 major pieces of equipment and several portable crushing plants throughout the United States. They design, engineer and fabricate crushing equipment for a variety of customers.
Essentially an excavating equipment company, the company processes 15 large jobs and 3 dozen small jobs a year comprised of thousands of drawings. Each of these standard and assembly drawings need to be complete with BOMs. The company builds using AutoCAD and processes purchasing and production requirements through Macola SQLserver. The missing Link between their design system and the production system caused extensive delays and subsequently would mean getting the job done wrong, overdue and over budget. The BOMLink system offered a seamless integration eliminating triple entry, confusion on the order status, and the typical issues of manual data entry in three separate islands of data.
CRANE ENVIRONMENTAL ExactMacola [SQLSERVER] and AutoCAD-2007
Crane Environmental is a leading supplier of specialized water purification solutions for the world's industrial and commercial markets. Crane Environmental is the integration of two powerful and well-known niche companies and brands in the water industry, Cochrane, Inc. and Environmental Products USA, Inc. Founded in 1863, Cochrane's earliest steam and water purification products and systems set industry standards for innovation, durability, and reliability. While maintaining our commitment to innovation, quality, and customer service, Cochrane continued to provide leadership in water purification solutions. Acquired by Crane Co. in 1960, Cochrane implemented a worldwide globalization plan. In 1998, Cochrane continued its focus on providing world-class solutions by acquiring Environmental Products, Inc., a recognized world leader in packaged reverse osmosis (RO) and nanofiltration (NF) systems. Today Crane Environmental is ready to serve all the world's specialized water purification needs.
Crane builds the state of the art waste water treatment systems that are sold worldwide including systems to the Navy. Their previous completely manual system included a completely disconnected engineering staff that completed drawings and identified the parts for the mechanical, electrical and the frame sub systems of the equipment.
This process was causing significant delays and red shipments on most jobs and cutting into the bottom line profits. The designers and production staff routinely logged in over 70 hours eyeballing items in a spreadsheet which caused a work overload factor and more than normal attrition of key personnel.
The domain knowledge was restricted and contained within the staff that worked on the drawings and not captured for enterprise-wide dissemination. For instance, a designer that worked on electrical panels would start with a spreadsheet of thousands of items already included and mark off with careful reference to the panel being built, the item and the quantity of each line item required. This assumed a great understanding of the specific parts the panel required from the drawing layout, then searching for the parts from the spreadsheet, tagging the item and cycling through and eyeballing the next item. When done, a macro filtered out the parts from the list to a specific BOM for the layout and the CRL (component requirements list) was forwarded to purchasing. This process was survived with a hope that there were no missing items, quantity mismatches or part number typos.
Change orders from customers mandated changes to drawings and regeneration of the CRL. This was based on the memory of the designer as to what changed. Procurement then learnt of the revised CRL by “sneaker net” (walking over or emailing a new one) often after they already have procured a costly motor or pump.
RMA and other activities were initiated as a norm to correct miscommunication between Engineering Island and Manufacturing World.
The company evaluated BOMLink and expects a fully automated end-to-end business solution. Currently BOMLink standardizes intelligent drawings and generates a one-click publishing to the back-end Macola database for purchasing required items.
FMC TECHNOLOGIES Matrix One [ORACLE] and AutoCAD-2004
FMC Technologies is a proven, global supplier of SOFEC® marine terminals, turret and spread mooring systems for a broad range of marine and subsea related requirements. All systems are customized and managed to meet exacting customer and industry requirements.
This FMC division, primarily a design house (i.e. no manufacturing) already had a massive investment in the leading Matrix One PLM system for managing BOMs, documents, parts and the like.
However, they identified a disconnect between their drawings and the PDM system. The PDM system (Oracle database) held the completed BOMs for the drawings. These BOMs were depicted in the AutoCAD drawings manually to make the CAD document complete with both the picture and the data. BOMLink facilitated a quick and efficient way to create a hotlink between AutoCAD and Matrix One. These hotlinks allow automatic drop of an existing BOM from oracle repository into the AutoCAD drawing, making the drawing intelligent and speeding up the process of creating and releasing customer drawings. With BOMLink, the accuracy is 100% since no data is hand typed into the drawings.
From its beginnings in 1997, Sherbrooke OEM Ltd. quickly outgrew its 3200 sq. ft building. Today, its shop and offices occupy a modern 25,000 square foot building, with an expanded 15,000 square foot addition. Sherbrooke O.E.M. designs and manufactures a complete line of conveyors for a variety of industrial and environmental applications with special expertise in the wood and recycling industries. Whatever your industry, Sherbrooke O.E.M. can engineer, manufacture and install a system to meet your specific requirements.
Independence Excavating is a recognized industry leader in excavation and site development, and is one of Cleveland, Ohio's premier and diversified construction companies. Excavating has evolved into a premier and diversified construction company which still maintains its base operations out of Cleveland, Ohio. IndexC owns and operates over 200 major pieces of equipment and several portable crushing plants throughout the United States. They design, engineer and fabricate crushing equipment for a variety of customers.
Crane builds the state of the art waste water treatment systems that are sold worldwide including systems to the Navy. Their previous completely manual system included a completely disconnected engineering staff that completed drawings and identified the parts for the mechanical, electrical and the frame sub systems of the equipment.
This FMC division, primarily a design house (i.e. no manufacturing) already had a massive investment in the leading Matrix One PLM system for managing BOMs, documents, parts and the like.