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Success Story

Integration of CAD/PDM with ERP

Integration of CAD/PDM with ERP

Customer challenge

B&P Engineering wanted to have a solution that would replace an existing custom made application which enables Autodesk Inventor for automatic Bill Of Materials (BOMs) generation. Because of a change of ERP system, the old application became very slow and unstable. XLS exchange format also created many problems during import to the ERP system. It slowed down data preparation and transfer to production. Often, because of automatic solution failure, the process had to be done manually. As a result, B&P Engineering faced production process delays and was facing a risk of revenue decreases.

Project goals

The main objective of this project was to deliver the most suitable solution that will connect the CAD environment with ERP and enable seamless data transfer from engineering to production, and also that will eliminate errors in data, which is transferred to technology and production departments. B&P Engineering expectations were to build a solution that will work without errors in 100% of cases, to provide fast and efficient data input to the engineering department, and to transfer quality BOMs with no errors.

Solution

Arkance Systems did the design and production preparation process analysis, and delivered an integrated solution that consisted of: 1) Autodesk Vault Professional - an integrated data management tool which helps design teams track work in progress and maintain version control in multi-user environments 2) Autodesk Inventor - a professional-grade 3D CAD software dedicated to product design and engineering 3) Arkance Business Connect - an add-on that efficiently reads materials data directly from the ERP database, and write BOMs back to the ERP database Arkance Systems coordinated the Vault Professional implementation, configuration and implementation services, together with end user training.

Business outcome

With this new integrated solution, B&P Engineering managed to drastically reduce the time spent on data preparation for production. As an additional benefit, the amount of errors in BOM data transferred to ERP was reduced to zero.

Conclusion

What is unique in the B&P Engineering CAD/PDM solution is that it is 100% adapted to the process of design and data preparation for production. Business Connect provided by Arkance Systems was aligned to fulfill designer's need to input data in Inventor as fast and efficient as possible. This bi-directional connection between Inventor/Vault and ERP enables designers to quickly describe models with requested material indexes (and other necessary data taken from ERP database), automatically sends request to ERP in order to create new product index, and finally exports BOM for the whole assembly.

Project summary

    Duration & delivery

  • 60
  • 2019-10-31

    Autodesk solutions

  • Inventor
  • Vault Professional

    Services provided

  • System Architecture
  • System Integration
  • Custom Application Development
  • System Implementation
  • Configuration & Deployment

    Customer industry

  • Design
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