MP Agro Reduces Development Costs 50 Percent with 3DEXPERIENCE Works

MP Agro eliminates revision errors, increases collaboration and innovation, and reduces development costs with 3DEXPERIENCE Works product development solutions and SOLIDWORKS software

Challenge

Shorten development cycles, reduce development costs, and improve quality by improving product data management, eliminating the potential for revision errors, and running simulations in the cloud, saving the cost of additional computing power.

Solution

Add cloud-based 3DEXPERIENCE Works solutions, including Collaborative Business Innovator, Collaborative Industry Innovator, and Collaborative Designer for SOLIDWORKS initially, and then add Structural Performance Engineer to the company’s existing SOLIDWORKS installation to enable automated, transparent data management and computationally intensive simulations in the cloud.

Results

Cut development cycles in half
Reduced development costs by 50 percent
Eliminated revision errors
Increased collaboration and innovation

Founded in 2012, MP Agro Máquinas Agrícolas makes agricultural equipment more efficient, productive, and reliable in the field. In just 10 years the company has become the leading manufacturer of fertilizer dispensers and spreaders in the Brazilian market.

Although MP Agro was successful, it needed to make its development cycles more efficient, cost-effective, and accurate to support a more aggressive R&D effort. “We had a lot of problems related to revision control with our previous product data management (PDM) system,” Engineering Supervisor Willian Sartori explains. “We were spending a lot of time and money on reworking designs due to people working with the wrong revision or overwriting someone else’s work.”

MP Agro also struggled with manually managing product data because its PDM system was not integrated with SOLIDWORKS®. The tide turned when the company implemented automated management of SOLIDWORKS design data using cloud-based 3DEXPERIENCE® Works solutions.

Cultivating Research and Development

Since implementing 3DEXPERIENCE Works solutions, MP Agro has cut its development cycles in half and decreased development costs by 50 percent because 3DEXPERIENCE Works solutions have enabled the company to tighten revision controls and eliminate revision errors, which had occurred frequently. “Our problems … had more to do with having five people working on the same project and either using the wrong revision or overwriting the right revision,” Sartori recounts.

Because data management solutions on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform make MP Agro more efficient and productive, the company is more able to focus on R&D. For example, increased collaboration and innovation facilitated by the 3DEXPERIENCE platform led to the development of Bunker, a new insecticide sprayer filling system that reduces the time required to reload a sprayer from an hour to a few minutes.

Fortifying Simulation

“As our R&D effort continues to grow and intensify, and our products become more sophisticated, we’ll be adding [SIMULIA’s] Structural Performance Engineer to expand the types of analyses that we can conduct,” Sartori says. “Our quality has always been good, but with access to SIMULIA’s analysis capabilities, we anticipate further reductions in the amount of product prototyping required, helping us to reduce development costs even more.” Structural Performance Engineer enables the ability to run advanced simulations on the cloud, freeing up local computing resources to maximize productivity.

Related Resources

We’re growing and looking to expand our product line into different areas, which is why solving our PDM issues was so important. Because tapping data management solutions on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform makes us more efficient and productive, we’re able to focus additional resources on R&D.

Willian Sartori

Engineering Supervisor