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The Challenge
Sub-Zero Freezer Company, Inc. and Wolf Appliance Company, Inc., an affiliated Wisconsin-based manufacturer of kitchen appliances, were posed with a common documentation control issue that often plagues manufacturing companies.
How can we get the right info to the right people at the right time, and in the most efficient manner?
Getting part prints to their employees, whether they work in Engineering, Purchasing, Sales or on the shop floor, had become a real challenge at Sub-Zero.
“Whenever I ask the group, ‘Who needs prints?’ Everybody’s hands shoot up because they don’t want to take the time to run the prints themselves, or they have other particular needs. For example, Procurement requires relatively small file formats that they can email to people,” explained Design Documentation Supervisor (Wolf Appliance) Mike McKinney.
McKinney estimated that he was pushing out about seven copies of each print just one year ago. Engineering Systems Manager (Sub-Zero and Wolf Appliance), Jason Lindgren, added that their employees – both locally and at remote facilities – were experiencing difficulty accessing needed prints with the system they currently had in place.
“For example,” said Lindgren, “People in the Operations Group just need to reference prints, maybe print them off, and take them over to the machines they’re working on to build the parts.”
McKinney and Lindgren focused their efforts on finding a remedy for this bottleneck in their process.
The Solution
InFlow Technology, Sub-Zero’s SmarTeam sales and support partner, recommend that McKinney and Lindgren consider supplementing their SmarTeam PLM system with Connexus, a data publishing tool.
“PLM / PDM systems are focused on managing and tracking product data.” Said Rod Levin, President of InFlow Technology. “To get the most out of this data it must be easily accessible to everyone in the organization who needs it.”
McKinney said he noticed an immediate improvement from his perspective.
“Every time I release an ECO from design, I simply group all of the drawings together by ECO number, pick them all at once, hit one button and it publishes it out to the Connexus server. Now anybody in the company can go in and open up a PDF file format very rapidly.”
Lindgren touted InFlow as a trusted technology advisor and true business partner for having recommended the SmarTeam-with-Connexus solution. He said that using Connexus has helped them better control the various situations that involve their part prints.
“Maybe it’s a purchase part, or maybe the supply chain needs to review it and send it out for quotes. Perhaps it’s a fab part and somebody in manufacturing-engineering needs to review the print to determine if there will be any issues with programming machines on the floor to punch out these parts,” Lindgren explained. “Connexus has proven to be a very good, user-friendly tool to help control these issues.”
Summary & Metrics
- 40% improvement with accessing prints quickly and easily, both locally and at remote sites
- The elimination of prints being pushed out, from 7 prints to )
- ECO administrative release time (filing, folding, preparing paper archives) and average of four hours a week, eliminated
- Well-received acceptance company-wide of the neutral, PDF file format used
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