Urban Accessories Manages Design Changes with Upchain

Urban Accessories, a Washington-based metal fabricating firm, has used Autodesk Inventor® for mechanical design for five years and was interested in a solution to manage design changes. They contacted Hagerman & Company to discuss Autodesk® Vault as a possible option. After a discovery call and demonstration of Upchain, they realized it was preferable to Vault for several reasons: The cost of implementation was low compared to Vault, the hosted solution meant no server or hardware to purchase and maintain, and ease of use.

Urban Accessories had several business goals. They wanted to improve engineering productivity, which would directly affect manufacturing and purchasing, allowing them to improve delivery time and increase customer orders. They hoped to save time and labor/support costs and reduce errors and material costs. They also wanted the ability to give suppliers and stakeholders access to a design in a fast and secure way. All of these factors would lead to increased profitability.

The implementation of Upchain in a short period of time allowed Urban Accessories to reduce errors in design and manufacturing and increase profitability. The short-term cost savings were reduced implementation services, server acquisition, and IT resources. The long-term cost savings included less labor in engineering, IT, and purchasing. Hagerman assisted Urban accessories with several onboarding sessions, and Autodesk's self-paced tutorials enabled Urban Accessories to get up and running quickly.

Upchain has enabled Urban Accessories' engineering team to collaborate more effectively on design review and change. The flexibility of a hosted PLM solution allows team members to work remotely when needed, so they can continue to work anytime, anywhere. Since the switch to Upchain, Urban Accessories has had a much easier time handling changes within design files, and they have a single source of truth, avoiding errors like overwriting each other's files.

Implementing a PLM or document management system can take months to learn and implement to production. By choosing Hagerman & Company to assist with Upchain, Urban Accessories could be in production in a matter of weeks. The "instant on" and self-paced tutorials made the onboard process relatively painless and allowed Urban Accessories to be productive much sooner than a traditional on-premise solution.

Delivery Date

Project Duration

Autodesk Solutions

• Fusion 360 Manage
• Upchain

Services Provided

• Installation
• Configuration & Deployment
• System & Software Maintenance
• System Integration
• Updates & Upgrades
• Virtualization

Customer Industry

• Additive Manufacturing
• Design
• Subtractive Manufacturing