MP Agro Reduces Development Costs 50 Percent with 3DEXPERIENCE Works

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.

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.