SUCCESS STORY
Cleaver-Brooks Uses Automation to Reduce Design Time
Customer Challenge
Increasing demand for customized designs soon led to Cleaver-Brooks looking into automation to meet market demand. Once a customer had approved a design during the sales planning stage, designers would receive the project to start work on the full design stage: both teams were working independently, with many manual tasks, that caused re-work, and wasted time.
Project Goals
Cleaver-Brooks established the business initiative to reduce this upfront engineering time by 10-15% for a large portion of their portfolio.
Solution
KETIV templatized 5 designs that could be interchanged and slightly customized from project to project. These 5 designs accounted for 80% of Cleaver-Brooks product portfolio at one production location. KETIV created a master library of common products that could be used to create unique configurations for potential customers. This master library was utilized by the design team to create a 3D designed general assembly within Autodesk’s Inventor product during the planning stage.
Business Outcome
Implementing automation reduced the time spent in the plan stage by 20%. This reduction in the planning stages results in a 10% reduction of up-front engineering time for the released jobs. With this faster turnaround, Cleaver-Brooks is now able to complete more bids and win more work.
Conclusion
What's Next? Cleaver-Brooks isn’t stopping there; they plan to add more product parts to their master library in order to increase the percentage of their product line that can be used for automation. In addition, continued use of the automation tool will likely help shave off another 10-15% of upfront time as the tool is iterated upon.
Project Summary
Delivery Date
2019-10-01
Project Duration
120 days
Autodesk Solutions
- Inventor
Services Provided
Customer Industry
- Other Engineering Industries