SolidWorks Express

case study provided by gedas

In the highly competitive world of manufacturing, tighter collaboration during the design and engineering process has become the key to success. This means there are often multiple providers using a variety of “toolkits” to accomplish design and development functions – making communications and coordination of the process more difficult and time sensitive.

As a result, enterprises are faced with a new challenge – how to create a virtual view of design specifications. A common view of design changes and the ability to execute smooth interfaces to the production systems is critical and without it, even simple product design changes can lead to confusion and waste on the manufacturing floor.

When Andrew Corporation, a leading global designer and manufacturer of communications equipment and systems, embraced the need for enterprise PLM integration, gedas provided the knowledge, leadership, and proprietary integration tools to make it possible.

Situation
Andrew Corporation had recently implemented SAP R/3® and was beginning to use the basic functionalities of Document Management. With the acquisition of a new business unit, however, Andrew quickly recognized the need to integrate their design capabilities into a single PLM platform.

Andrew needed an enterprise-wide view of their Bill of Materials (BOM) to

align information from their engineering systems with the information in their production systems, and ensure seamless data transfer between the two. The company also wanted to consolidate multiple CAD environments (such as SolidWorks®and Pro/E®) using the SAP CAD Desktop system.

The ultimate challenge? Andrew was quickly approaching a go-live date for it “Project Concord” engineering solution which, if not met, would be costly to the company.

Challenges
• Integrate SolidWorks® and SAP R/3 to facilitate seamless data transfer between Andrew’s design and manufacturing systems.
• Consolidate multiple CAD environments (including SolidWorks and Pro/ENGINEER®) using the SAP CAD Desktop system.

Solution
The gedas-developed interface between SolidWorks and SAP R/3 met many of Andrew’s requirements, however, Andrew’s request to allow some of its designers to continue using SAP’s CAD Desktop meant some customization was required. gedas led the effort to adapt the integration product to meet this new requirement.

A ten-day pilot was designed and a beta version of gedas’ modified integration product was created for Andrew’s RF division in Warren, New Jersey. Andrew created a rigorous expectations document, which gedas readily embraced. At the end of the ten-day pilot gedas had:

• Analyzed the business process blueprint and developed a to-be process that met all of Andrew’s business requirements with minimal development work.
• Installed and configured the gedas-built mySAP PLM integration release 4.5 for SolidWorks to cover all functionality offered in the pilot environment.
• Enabled collaboration between multiple locations so that all Andrew sites
and departments can access data from one consistent database with no
replication required.
• Coordinated work among SEAL Systems, SAP and Andrew to bring about
successful conversion of SolidWorks files from the CAD Desktop.
• Simultaneously developed user exits to fill some gaps in Andrew’s business process requirements.
• Setup and configured the SAP KPRO vault for document management functions.
• Provided training for Andrew’s Key user and CAD designers.
Benefits Realized
• Response to customer change requests has improved dramatically because all departments are sharing the exact same data.
•Development time on new designs is drastically reduced.
• Automatic document BOM updates from SolidWorks models ensure design and manufacturing are synchronized in real time, resulting in optimized production.
• The status of all parts and assemblies are effortlessly and automatically
maintained, preventing redundancies.