Plymovent Clears a Path for Product Data

Airborne contaminants are a common hazard. Welding and cutting generate fumes, smoke, and dust. CNC machining can release oil mist. Vehicles operating indoors produce exhaust that must be captured before spreading through a garage, testing facility, or fire station. Capturing a contaminant at its source is generally preferred; when that is impractical, hoods or general-filtration systems can reduce a contaminant’s concentration in the surrounding workspace.

Industrial air filtration engineers must solve several distinct mechanical problems. A complete system may combine extraction arms, downdraft tables, hoods, hoses, nozzles, rail systems, fans, filtration equipment, controls, and air-quality monitoring. Configuration changes with the process, contaminant load, facility layout, number of workstations, and anticipated growth of a company. Therefore, it’s important to maintain accurate specifications and controlled product information from design through manufacturing, installation, and service.

Plymovent develops, manufactures, sells, and services equipment for metalworking contaminants and vehicle exhaust. The company has grown since 1975 to more than 350 employees supporting its international operations. Products are designed and manufactured at the head office in Alkmaar, the Netherlands, while manufacturing and assembly also take place in Cranbury, New Jersey, in the U.S., and in a company-managed factory in Chiang Mai, Thailand. That global structure created the central tension in Plymovent’s product development process: How could teams separated by departments, systems, and geography be certain they were acting on the same, most up-to-date information?

Struggling with Disconnected Systems

Plymovent's previous product data management system primarily served R&D. "People outside the [engineering] department only really connected through separate software. That was where the real frustration came from,” noted Project Leader Ragheed Shamoon. Because the company is geographically dispersed, it was difficult to ensure that everyone was working from the same designated and latest product information.

Drawings and specifications created in the Netherlands had to reach production teams in Thailand without ambiguity. Changes also had to be seamlessly communicated between the company's three manufacturing and assembly locations. According to R&D Manager Jeroen Crezee, "For us it is essential that our specifications are properly secured. That we test, create drawings, and record specifications properly and have one source of [reliable] information." Incomplete, incorrect, or deviating information could create myriad problems in such a diverse environment.

The company’s legacy PDM system added an access constraint: Employees working away from the corporate network could find themselves unable to access data. As cooperation with the Thai engineering department increased, Plymovent needed centralized, secure, and reliable information available across all sites.

Connecting Familiar CAD to a Shared Platform

Plymovent wanted to preserve its established design environment while changing how product information moved through the organization. Crezee explains, "SOLIDWORKS® has been our regular CAD software for years and we are very satisfied with it. So, we wanted to have something that is integrated as much as possible within the SOLIDWORKS world." That requirement led Plymovent to implement the 3DEXPERIENCE® platform alongside SOLIDWORKS.

SOLIDWORKS Design remains the CAD environment used at the Alkmaar office to develop the company's products and create drawings that support manufacturing. The cloud-based 3DEXPERIENCE platform provides a centralized environment for product information and processes. Authorized users can reach the data without being on Plymovent's internal network, which helps ensure engineering and downstream departments work from the same information across locations.

The move to cloud-based data management was not without controversy: Plymovent's IT organization considered dependence on third parties for their own data nerve-wracking. And what if they lost their internet connection? The team weighed those concerns against the access limitations of the previous on-premises data management system. As Crezee explains, "So we tried to make it simple, bring the scope back to the minimum we would need [in data management] to get started and only then expand to new things."

Keeping Production Aligned with Design Changes

The most evident improvement is process visibility. In the former system, the organization could not easily see where a specific change was stalled. Shamoon notes, "In the new [3DEXPERIENCE] system we can actually see every step in the process all the way through to production in our factory in Thailand." Teams can identify where work is held up, investigate the reason, and act when a step is taking too long or remains unclear.

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform also extends controlled information beyond R&D. The result is a clearer path for specifications, drawings, and changes to travel from engineering through production.

Data confidence is the more fundamental benefit. A single set of product information reduces uncertainty about which file or revision should guide manufacturing. Cloud access addresses the company’s diverse geography, while shared process visibility addresses its organizational challenges. Together, those capabilities give teams in the Netherlands and Thailand a common foundation for executing product changes.

Creating a Stronger Foundation for Global Growth

Plymovent's experience demonstrates that global engineering depends on more than transferring CAD files between locations. Product data must remain connected to the drawings, specifications, revisions, and decisions that tell manufacturing what to build. SOLIDWORKS Design provides a powerful yet familiar design environment, while the 3DEXPERIENCE platform makes that information accessible and traceable across departments and sites.

For Plymovent, trust in the data was the threshold requirement. Crezee concludes, "There has never been a single second of doubt about the integrity and reliability of the data, and that is ultimately the foundation on which this platform must operate." With that data management foundation in place, the company can expand its use of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform deliberately at their convenience as their company grows.