How transportation manufacturers overcome customization, cost, and compliance challenges with DriveWorks
Transportation manufacturers face increasing pressure to deliver highly customized products that comply with all necessary safety standards, meet customer expectations for fast turnaround times, and ensure efficient sales and manufacturing processes that enable a profitable business model.
Whether you’re manufacturing truck bodies, trailers, specialty vehicles, or transportation equipment, balancing customization with efficiency can be difficult. DriveWorks enables transportation manufacturers to automate design, streamline sales processes, and deliver custom products faster and more accurately.
What are the biggest challenges facing transportation manufacturers?
Transportation manufacturers face four common challenges:
- Managing complex product customization
- Controlling material costs and reducing waste
- Meeting safety and regulatory requirements
- Improving efficiency
These challenges can lead to slow turnaround times, increased costs and errors, and make it difficult to manufacture customized transportation products at scale.
Manufacturers in the transportation industry use DriveWorks design automation, 3D product configurator, and CPQ solutions to overcome these challenges.
How can transportation manufacturers handle complex product customization?
One of the biggest challenges for trailer and truck manufacturers in the transportation industry is meeting each customer’s unique specifications. Frequent customization requests can complicate the manufacturing process, making it hard to keep up with demand and maintain quality standards.
How DriveWorks helps
DriveWorks enables transportation manufacturers to efficiently deliver custom products by automating design and configuration processes. Using DriveWorks’ rules-based design automation solution, engineering logic is applied consistently across every design, reducing repetitive CAD tasks and automatically generating accurate designs faster. Guided selling and 3D visualization enable customers to accurately configure their product options to meet their exact requirements.
How can transportation manufacturers manage costs effectively?
Materials, energy, and production costs continue to affect manufacturers across industries, including transportation. To profitably produce highly customized products, accurate material and resource allocation and planning is crucial. Manual processes can lead to material waste and rework, adding additional costs to manufacturing processes.
How DriveWorks helps
DriveWorks enables rules-based product configuration by applying engineering logic to material selections for every custom design. This ensures design accuracy and appropriate material selection.
DriveWorks also automatically generates BOMs and cutting lists for every configured product, enabling manufacturers to make efficient use of materials.
How can transportation manufacturers ensure product compliance?
Ensuring safety compliance is an integral part of assembling trucks and trailers. With numerous safety regulations expected from vehicle manufacturers, compliance management can be expensive and require additional resources.
How DriveWorks helps
DriveWorks enables the integration of safety standards and regulatory requirements directly into the design process, ensuring that every truck or trailer configuration complies with necessary safety guidelines.
DriveWorks also automates the generation of manufacturing documentation, making it easier for manufacturers to demonstrate compliance with safety standards during audits and inspections.
How can transportation manufacturers improve efficiency?
Streamlining inefficient manufacturing processes and maximizing sales is a key challenge for transportation manufacturers operating in a competitive market.
How DriveWorks helps
DriveWorks enables transportation manufacturers to streamline design workflows y by automatically creating accurate SOLIDWORKS manufacturing drawings. Using DriveWorks enables transportation manufacturers to capture and reuse design, manufacturing, and cost estimation knowledge to deliver customized vehicles and trailers faster and with greater accuracy.
DriveWorks also streamlines quoting and selling processes, enabling sales teams to accurately configure custom transportation products and automatically generate accurate quotes. This leads to increased sales and improved customer satisfaction.
Frequently asked questions about DriveWorks solutions for transportation manufacturers
What do transportation manufacturers use DriveWorks for?
Transportation manufacturers use DriveWorks to design, sell, and produce custom products faster and with greater accuracy.
Does DriveWorks speed up quoting?
Yes. DriveWorks enables transportation manufacturers to generate accurate quotes, proposals, and manufacturing documents and data faster than traditional manual processes.
How does DriveWorks reduce bottlenecks between sales and engineering?
DriveWorks enables sales teams to accurately configure manufacturable products and automatically generate accurate quotes. This removes errors and rework, improves team collaboration, and frees up engineers to work on higher-value tasks such as new product development.
How does DriveWorks help transportation manufacturers reduce design errors?
DriveWorks applies predefined engineering rules to every configuration, ensuring products are valid and manufacturable. This reduces the risk of errors associated with manual configuration and design processes.
Can DriveWorks generate SOLIDWORKS® drawings automatically?
Yes. DriveWorks enables transportation manufacturers to automatically generate order-specific SOLIDWORKS parts, assemblies, drawings, and BOMs based on customer requirements and engineering rules.
Transportation manufacturers achieving success with DriveWorks
Oasis Trailers have reduced drawing time from 20 mins to 5 mins using DriveWorksXpress.
Using DriveWorks, WEATHER GUARD transformed their sales process with a 3D product configurator, automatic quoting, and integration with Salesforce CRM.
Using DriveWorks, Knapehiede are automating mundane tasks, improving communication, and helping their engineers keep up with demand.
Want to learn more?
Find a reseller
DriveWorks is sold worldwide and supported locally by authorized resellers in your time zone.
In addition to providing product support, DriveWorks resellers also offer DriveWorks training programs and can provide guidance on getting started.
Request a demo
Request a demo with a DriveWorks technical specialist.
They’re experts in design automation, 3D product configurator, and CPQ, and will show you how easy it is to get started.
Join a manufacturing technology webinar
Our manufacturing technology webinar series is a great way to learn about the key concepts of DriveWorks. It’s designed to demonstrate how manufacturers can benefit from DriveWorks technology solutions across their operations.