Overcoming challenges in enclosure manufacturing
Enclosure manufacturers face several challenges, including highly variable sizes, materials, and environmental ratings, a growing demand for custom builds, compliance requirements, slow sales cycles, and the risk of costly design errors.
DriveWorks design automation, 3D configurator, and CPQ solutions streamline design engineering workflows, ensure quality, and speed up design and sales cycles for custom enclosure products.
How DriveWorks makes a difference
Customization
Enclosure configurations can be complex with multiple variables for dimensions, cut-outs, accessories, internal layouts, etc.
DriveWorks enables customization without additional engineering workload. Custom models, drawings, and BOMs are generated automatically, saving engineering time and ensuring accuracy.
Configuration rules prevent incompatible options, ensuring all specifications are accurate. This reduces rework volumes and improves customer satisfaction.
Accuracy
Maintaining accuracy levels is difficult with overloaded manual sales and design configuration processes.
DriveWorks ensures that every configuration follows engineering rules and parameters, guaranteeing accuracy. Drawings and BOMs match customer specifications, and models and drawings are generated consistently.
Guided selling enables sales teams to accurately configure complex enclosure configurations without the need for extensive product knowledge or training.
Regulatory compliance
Regulatory compliance is an important requirement of enclosure manufacturing. Supplying compliant products is non-negotiable and a key component of building customer trust.
DriveWorks ensures only compliant configuration options can be selected, ensuring that compliance is maintained for even the most complex customized products. Automatically-generated manufacturing documents, data, and drawings also reflect compliance requirements.
Optimized pricing
Custom enclosures have many different configuration options, making pricing difficult.
DriveWorks automates pricing for custom enclosures, dynamically updating prices as different product options are configured. Even for the most experienced salespeople, calculating pricing is complex and requires constant reference to pricing spreadsheets and recalculation. With automated pricing, the risk of errors is reduced, and sales teams can easily handle complex pricing models.
Shorter sales cycles
For manufacturers of custom enclosures, long sales cycles are a common challenge. Custom enclosure sales cycles involve extensive dialogue with customers, from the initial design phase through to quoting, pricing, and order confirmation.
DriveWorks empowers sales teams to configure products without help from engineering. Customers can visualize their options with 3D previews, and quotes are automatically generated. Additionally, quote approvals, where required, are automated, ensuring a streamlined approval workflow.
Scalability
As custom manufacturing businesses grow, manual processes become bottlenecks, slowing down growth and limiting expansion opportunities.
For both small companies just starting out and established manufacturers looking to grow their operations, DriveWorks scales to meet business needs. Its flexible architecture ensures that as the business grows, the technology can easily handle the increased complexity.
Cubis Systems accelerates production with DriveWorks
Cubis Systems is a world leader in composite access chambers and cable protection systems, exporting to over 30 countries worldwide. With a growth in demand for bespoke solutions, they introduced automation to create SOLIDWORKS® sales drawings faster and more efficiently.
Cubis started automating designs with DriveWorks Solo. They implemented the software as a sales drawing configurator to automate drawings for modular chambers and composite access frames and covers.
The team quickly realised that by upgrading to DriveWorks Pro, they could introduce 3D models for steel fabrication – which not only helps its production team to better understand the requirement, but also gives customers a better feel for the final product during the sales process.
Before DriveWorks, it could take Cubis 20 minutes to generate a drawing for a single component, while a full system could take up to a day. Now, SOLIDWORKS models and drawings can be produced in a fraction of the time – with single components generated in seconds, and a full system taking around six minutes maximum to complete.
Using DriveWorks has also had a significant impact on new starter training. Previously, new starters could spend three months learning the rules and logic for just a single product group. Now that the rules and logic are built into the DriveWorks configurator, team members can be up and running and producing full system drawings in a single day.
DriveWorks has made such a difference that we don’t want to stop here. The next step is for us to take our configurator out to our customers, so our sales team can generate specifications on site.
Luke Robinson,
CAD/DriveWorks Engineer at Cubis Systems
Configure, design, sell, and manufacture custom products faster
DriveWorks technology enables you to accurately configure custom products, calculate pricing, and automatically create documents and data for sales and manufacturing.
Learn more about DriveWorks technology and how your business could benefit with a DriveWorks demo. One of our technical experts will take you under the hood of our technology and explain the features of our design automation, product configurator, and CPQ for manufacturing solutions in more detail.