SUCCESS STORY
C&D Turns to Synergis for Process Improvement Guidance After Acquisition
Customer Challenge
For more than 100 years, C&D Technologies, Inc (“C&D”) has been manufacturing and supporting innovative systems for the conversion and storage of electrical power and delivering world-class power solutions for mission-critical industrial applications. Recently, C&D acquired Trojan Battery Company, LLC (“Trojan”), a leading manufacturer of deep-cycle Solar and Motive batteries. With the combination of both companies, it was discovered that they had different ways of handling design, data, and change management, that needed to be streamlined into a single, easy-to-adopt process.
Project Goals
C&D approached Synergis Engineering Design Solutions for guidance on how to tackle their complicated change management project, as there were several areas that needed to be addressed. During initial analysis and discussion, the following goals were established:
• Reconfigure a fully unified production process based on the acquisition
• Make sure the new process was easily manageable, and deploy the solution to multiple locations
• Provide a single data source to manage change within all corporate divisions
Solution
When accounting for all the variables presented, and the end goals of C&D, the recommendation to implement Autodesk Fusion 360 Manage within the recently acquired Trojan was approved. To implement Autodesk Fusion 360 Manage, Synergis worked with C&D to first define what their unified process should look like. The next step was to evaluate if the new unified process should be a modification to their existing process in Fusion 360 Manage, or if an entirely new process should be developed.
The decision was made to modify the existing production process, by configuring and testing the process in a sandbox workspace. The unified process was then configured by Synergis in their production Fusion 360 Manage environment. Finally, user training on the new, unified process was provided to all administrators.
Business Outcome
Upon successful completion of the project, a new process was established for C&D to use to manage not only their existing change process, but also manage the change process within the newly acquired company. This was particularly useful, since the entire system is truly cloud-based, and deploying to multiple locations was simple. The inclusion of additional metadata, approval assignment, and notifications configured to include both companies resulted in huge time savings by providing everyone with a more initiative search for the right data.
Conclusion
The expert guidance of Synergis Engineering Design Solutions enabled C&D to handle the large acquisition of another manufacturer, migrate data, and establish a new production process that met the new requirements for integrating the acquisition into their process. They said, “Having the support of Scott Stortz [from Synergis] and getting their insight and advice on how to best tackle our problems and challenges had been a huge benefit!”
Additionally, with the comprehensive training provided by Scott, C&D is beginning to tackle customizations and configurations on their own. The success of the PLM implementation has convinced C&D to look at using Autodesk Fusion 360 Manage in other departments for additional workflow streamlining and cost benefits.
Project Summary
Delivery Date
2021-11-07
Project Duration
4 days
Autodesk Solutions
- Fusion 360 Manage
Services Provided
- System Integration
Customer Industry
- Design & Manufacturing