Lawrence and David are a trailer and bodybuilding manufacturer building custom vehicles to whatever a customer wants really. We can fit pretty much anything onto a job as long as it's within the legal limits. So the speed and accuracy of what we're building is integral to how we work without having accurate models of what's going to be built on the shop floor means that we induce delays. So using SOLIDWORKS we can double check things all line up and using the FEA side of it we can do the double checks just to make sure that what we are designing means that when it's going down the roads it doesn't fall apart. Our current system is very old it's originally designed about 1970. It is very efficient at what it does but it does mean that we're relying on things being updated manually and not being able to check what it's producing for the paperwork for guys on the shop floor because there's no visual representation of what they're actually building except for some loose drawings that are more representations of certain stages rather than the actual part of what they're going to do. DriveWorks is going to replace it completely and it will mean that we have accurate job specific drawings that guys on the shop floor can reference and make sure that everything actually lines up before he gets to them to reduce some of the errors that we see. Our current system is currently supported by one person in the UK and he eventually is going to want to retire so that is our current driving force that and we are moving ERP system from our current one to SAP so as part of the changeover it made sense at this point to as part of DriveWorks change part numbering the design process production flow process and sort of incorporate it all into one giant move across into a new system because the way that our current system works is a flat bomb it doesn't necessarily tie in nicely with a treed bomb system that is required in SAP whereas DriveWorks can be manipulated to do what we need it to do so that things could be uploaded and moved into the SAP system for the ERP runs. DriveWorks is really our only choice for what we want to do to automate the design process and tie it directly into SOLIDWORKS and into their PDM system being able to edit the end models so that it can produce what we'd class as a generic one and then we can customize it and repart number it if needs be to suit whatever customer requirements are there to enable us to keep the flexibility we have in our current system but mean that we can produce more accurate drawings and designs with the shop floor. So we currently have 30 plus years of design process that has evolved quite organically we haven't really assessed that for a long time and this is a good clean break now to pick out the parts of the automation that we prefer and hopefully put into DriveWorks. 30 plus years of organic change in the design of the product has been difficult to capture we do have a history but one of the main benefits of the DriveWorks project we can see and build rules in real time and immediately see if they succeed if we if there's an error there are aero drilling tools it's important it's in the right direction before we considered DriveWorks our workflows were quite basic they did the job now we have many automation tasks that DriveWorks can handle we have given ourselves a bit more of a complex workflow without putting a demand onto the engineers we have a lot of tools to do so initially we were hoping to use consultancy in two ways one to help our sort of day-to-day development of the project and to sort of offload some of the rule implementation and design work due to the nature of our business and what we've designed we'd have to have trained somebody up to actually do the design work to make sure it's actually usable for the guys on the shop floor so instead we swapped to a weekly meeting with a consultant our consultants pool and he's helped us along the way setting up DriveWorks making sure we've got all the models to state that are easily repeatable within the software so the setup of DriveWorks and how it's done using the broad bases is very similar to how our current system works and it's potentially a little bit more than we thought they may be but how it goes together makes much more sense after we've been using it for a period of time and you can see how you can add in more flexibility into the rules and increase the complexity over time if you need to currently the investment and time taken away from the general day-to-day has been quite large but once we've finished we believe that we will receive that time back we can run many different jobs in tandem we will see the physical output from our decisions much sooner and it helps with training as well we can get new starters to run very simple jobs and see what they produce and hopefully that will help with their understanding you can use those models then to point out anything that they may need to be aware of it's also good for training in more senior members of the department because you don't always run the same jobs over and over you may have a different product type that you've not built for a couple of years to see that model then jogs to the memory unfortunately we couldn't find a CRM system out of the box that covered everything that we wanted by making a CRM system within a DriveWorks product we could tailor it specifically to our builds anything that is key within the haulage industry in particular we could focus on without having to spend a lot of time searching if we spent the time searching focusing on the points that we want then we're happier to do that having the ability to front load our salesman with information will be a massive benefit to the engineering team a large proportion of our time is currently answering questions from customers because they're reading text they often have a misunderstanding of what's being offered if there is a model or pictures of old jobs within the CRM system they have a clear understanding of what we can offer engineering wise our jobs don't take too long it's the in-between processes between departments we are quite busy in each department and that extends the time we can run as job within three days if it's a standard job we're looking to reduce that down to a day by automating those internal processes one of the biggest demands is from our new ERP system they require multi-level bombs with routing this is a process we have not yet achieved using our old system but with DriveWorks we are able to cherry pick the level of assembly that we are sending over to the ERP system with each product being driven as its own project we are able to run the configuration system live and still have new projects in development these could then be tested to the fullest extent and rolled out almost immediately we're hoping for a more efficient design and engineering process and passing that on to the customer with models to remove any ambiguity allowing us to convert more quotes into contracts implementing DriveWorks involves many departments in the business you need their buy-in i would say set out a plan stick to that plan and make sure you consistently put in the hours to see any benefit