As a manufacturing company, you want to help your customer as efficiently as you can. Working conform to the Engineer to Order principle is not an acceptable method anymore for creators of configurable products. The customer demands a large amount of customization possibilities, and also expects a fast delivery along with sharp pricing.
Reducing engineering runtime is an aspect fitting developments within Smart Industries. When configurable products are designed based on each specific customer request, you are working suboptimally. In part due to integrations between configuration software and CAD software, you can fully automate your customer-specific engineering. This allows you to work Configure-to-Order. By automating this specific customer request of complex products, engineers gain more time for other projects. And their capabilities are better utilized.
In this blog, we explain all about how you can convert your Engineer to Order (ETO) process to a completely different approach. Additionally, we explain a workflow that minimizes engineering runtime.
It is important to have a good vision of which components of your product can be built modularly. These can be standardized in a later stadium. It is likely that the different modular components are already spinning through your head. Because you have been working Engineer-to-Order up until now, you quickly lose your overview.
Define your product. What does the product consist of? Which components are truly customized and which components can already be seen as standard? Where in the past customization was seen as a few factors such as measurements or dimensions of (a parametric) products, customization has now gained an entirely new definition. Customization is now seen as all of the components of a product that take you back to the drawing table. Products are built in different manners, and in turn you have to supply components that have not been built before.
Your engineers work with several CAD-programs. A parametric model needs to be built. By building the model parametrically, it becomes possible to automate repeated changes and specific product components. You establish certain functions and restrictions, allowing changes to dynamically adjust the model. This makes it much easier to categorize your components.
Elfsquad can be integrated with Dynamaker, among others. You can choose the way it appears in your own showroom. The benefit here is that everything is displayed parametrically. When you change the width, the display will change along with it. Curious about how this works? Check out an example here.
With a direct integration between Elfsquad CPQ and your CAD program, Autodesk Inventor to name one, it becomes possible to let them communicate. On the basis of a use case, we demonstrate how an integration between CAD & Elfsquad CPQ converts your ETO-process to a CTO-process, enabling a big reduction of runtime.
Imagine. At least 80% of the desired product can be built modularly. The final 20% is customer specific, causing engineers to spend several hours on the final design. After creating the configuration model in Elfsquad CPQ, a project folder for assembly is created in the background. This assembly consists of all the modular parts of the product. The assembly is made ready when a quotation has been accepted. The aforementioned 20% for engineering is automatically followed up. From Elfsquad, an instruction is sent to the engineers. This instruction could be something like a sketch. Based on the sketch, the engineer works out the last bit of customization.
Integration with existing applications is crucial for Elfsquad. Elfsquad integrates with over 3000 applications. You want to work towards building the perfect workflow. We explain a quite usual workflow to sketch an impression of the different possibilities. Of course, a workflow can be designed completely how you want it, to best fit the existing business processes.
By automating as many processes as you can in the way demonstrated above, you can gain a lot of efficiency. By automating these processes, errors in quotations become a thing of the past. You work with certain product logic, where all possible combinations are put on paper.
Have you become curious about how our CPQ-software solution could also support your processes? We will gladly tell you more about this. Request a demo. During a demo we explain all about:
Curious as to how we would recommend that Elfsquad takes care of your pre-production process? Contact us to schedule a demo.
Bring in the Elfsquad
