Supporting Customer Dreams
Fuelling Efficiency: How Extronics Empowers Design Automation with DriveWorks
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The biggest benefit of using DriveWorks in Extronics is consistency and pace. We developed our business around products that are suitable for hazardous areas. Hazardous areas, what do we mean? We mean anywhere where there might be an explosive gas or dust atmosphere. it was just starting to change. As I as I joined, we'd done the first wireless product and that kind of sparked the idea that we wanted to be a bit of a technology business in our own little niche. at the heart of any Internet of things, is a really good infrastructure. Bringing wireless infrastructure into hazardous areas isn't easy. It's quite a complicated process there are a lot of things to consider Extronics as a business made a conscious decision to invest in technology that could streamline this process and deliver consistent and safe outputs for our customers. Being a manufacturer of specialist products, it's important that we demonstrate to our customers what our USP is and why they should work with us. We knew that our lead times were extended, we had to do something. So we started to look for how can we make this better? Part of that is investing in internal systems that allow us to make the process easy for our customers, but equally easier for our internal teams. we’d gone on this journey from reseller to manufacturer and the area that we’ve focused in on is industrial Internet of things and what we're enabling with enabling our customers a digitalization journey and what better way to do that than to digitalize ourselves. That has an inherent benefit to our customers as well, because it means we can deliver products and solutions far quicker, which is obviously a benefit to them and their own digitalization strategies. Using DriveWorks is a tool allows us to do that and really accelerate our digitalization strategy. It really made sense because of how DriveWorks is integrated with SOLIDWORKS. We've been working with SOLIDWORKS for, you know, for about 15 years in the business. So all our CAD models are SOLIDWORKS. All our products are represented digitally in SOLIDWORKS and it makes sense for us to go with something that was really integrated particularly well with SOLIDWORKS. and we've ended up with quite a range of wireless products and accessories, it felt like the right time to start automating that process, removing the friction, removing the barriers for the customer, making easy and quick we're helping people extend their network into hazardous areas. So if we can do that quicker for them and make the process as painless as possible through the using tools like drive works, that's only going to be a benefit to them and to our relationship with our customers. We had to go back and understand that our models, although we had everything in SOLIDWORKS, they did not lend themselves particularly well to being automated. the first part of that project was we perhaps underestimated that we had to go back and redo some work, how are we going to automate them, how are we going to use them? when we went back and looked at our models, we realized with the help of Solid Solutions that we had a model for automation. and allow our customers to configure it in a way that we couldn't do previously. so what DriveWorks has allowed us to do is take a relatively complicated assessment process for the product, that was taking days, previously, and it's reduced that down to a matter of minutes. we realized that there were other opportunities within the business that we could use it for. One example is that we're going to be launching a 3D configurator on our website The big benefit of having a 3D configurator on the website is that a customer, before even speaking to us, can configure their product and really understand what it is that we're doing for them the way DriveWorks has improved the way we work internally is really align sales and manufacturing. the outputs that sales are giving to the customer to say, this is this is what we're going to provide? The engineer is automated and rule based, and then we end up with consistent outputs that we give some manufacturer and the customer gets exactly what they need. another great resource for helping us with our implementation has been the DriveWorks community. So on there we have the forum. So I've asked a few questions on the DriveWorks forum and got answers from other DriveWorks users as well as people that work in DriveWorks. The tech tips. Fantastic. You can download those And then of course, DriveWorks world. I would absolutely encourage anybody to attend DriveWorks World if you're in that space of using DriveWorks Overall, working with DriveWorks has been a very positive experience. We've actually achieved quite a lot in quite a short period of time DriveWorks isn't just a tool for internal operations. There is so much from a front end perspective that customers see that is really, really critical to proving ROI and a USP for them for buying our products. That is what DriveWorks has allowed us to do