End-to-end engineering process management helps door manufacturer increase orders by 2x, reducing delivery times by over 70%

Challenges.

Legacy systems and traditional detailed engineering work processes that made custom product deliveries a week-long process, as measurements and customer specifications varied across orders.

New technology investments and continuous training and hiring was going to escalate operations and productions costs, dig into profits, and pose risks of losing competitive advantages and market share.

Solutions and Approach.

HitechDigital partnered with the client to take on their end-to-end design development processes, and enabled process excellence initiatives to reduce overall engineering time by 80% and achieve 99.7% quality levels. This was achieved in three phases.

End-to-end engineering project management

Through an engineering team, with certifications in metal and steel door designs of different profiles, and expertise in SOLIDWORKS® and DriveWorks®, HitechDigital offered the following solutions.

• Concept to manufacture solutions for each customer order, which involved:
  • 3D modeling and representations
  • Drawings, BOM
  • Manufacturing documents
• Reduced quality issues by above 95%
• Cut down on engineering time by over 50%
• Scaled up, managing engineering work for all orders (5000+ per month)

Design Automation

An authorized partner for DriveWorks implementation, HitechDigital automated design processes, reducing client’s engineering time by over 60%. This second phase involved:

• 100% automation of engineering work for about 40% of client projects – by developing DriveWorks Configurators for Sales Order Entry Services.
• For other projects, which were complex or highly personalized, design development was performed using SOLIDWORKS®. Repetitive tasks were identified and automated in DriveWorks or though plugins, add-ons and custom macros for SOLIDWORKS.

Process Excellence and Continuous Improvement Initiatives

Rising monthly order volume called for systems in place to track orders at individual customer levels. And increased overall quality control time. In response to this, HitechDigital offered several solutions:

• Process improvements – automation implemented for 70% projects through further development of DriveWorks, further reducing delivery times.
• Quality Improvements ensuring 99.7% quality levels  – This led to the client taking off Quality control at his end, with design data from HitechDigital fed directly into CNC machines at client end. The process involved:
  • automating all repetitive quality checks
  • automated flagging of all kinds of errors, missing items, deviations from specs, etc.
  • two-level quality audits and reviews at various stages
• Order Visibility – developed a dashboard to track status and performance for engineering work per customer order.
• Real-time project monitoring – a new Project Management System that allows real-time tracking on defined KPIs to increase transparency across project processes.