Complexity and customization challenges
Industrial component manufacturers produce highly customized items. Products such as valves, pumps, motors, and enclosures often vary in size, material, performance, compliance requirements, and pricing. Complex configurations don’t fit easily into traditional manufacturing processes originally set up for off-the-shelf products. This can lead to bottlenecks and delays in design, quote, and sales cycles.
DriveWorks design automation, 3D product configurator, and CPQ solutions enable industrial component manufacturers to automate complex engineering design tasks, shorten sales cycles, improve accuracy, and optimize pricing.
Shorter sales cycles
Sales cycles for custom products can be lengthy, often involving multiple back-and-forth communications to confirm product configurations and pricing. This can slow down the sales cycle considerably.
Guided selling functionality in DriveWorks CPQ enables salespeople to configure custom industrial components, apply real-time pricing, and generate accurate quotes quickly. This not only shortens the sales cycle but also improves the customer experience.
Reduced engineering workload
The design engineering workload for custom products can be time-consuming and prone to error. Manual design processes for “same but different” products are labor-intensive and often develop bottlenecks.
DriveWorks automatically generates SOLIDWORKS® CAD models, drawings, and manufacturing documents for custom industrial components. By removing repetitive, time-consuming tasks, engineers have more time to focus on higher-value work such as product development.
Improved accuracy
For manufacturers of custom products, maintaining design accuracy and consistency across different products, sectors, and countries is critical. Consistent design quality promotes customer trust, reduces errors and rework, and lowers production costs.
DriveWorks enables manufacturers to automate the generation of SOLIDWORKS models, BOMs, and drawings for custom industrial component orders. Using intelligent rules-based technology to generate accurate “same but different” designs automatically, manufacturers reduce errors and rework, and improve customer satisfaction.
Optimized pricing
Pricing for custom industrial components can be very detailed, with factors such as volume discounts, customer-specific pricing, and promotional offers. Even for the most experienced salespeople, calculating custom pricing is complex and requires constant reference to pricing spreadsheets and recalculation.
DriveWorks automates pricing calculations for custom products, dynamically updating prices for different configurations. With automated pricing, the risk of errors is reduced, and sales teams can manage complex pricing models.
Scalability
As businesses grow, whether adding new product lines or expanding into new markets, the level of complexity associated with custom manufacturing also increases.
DriveWorks is scalable and can grow with your business. DriveWorks can easily accommodate the addition of new custom product configurations, manage large amounts of data, and handle complex calculations as your business expands.
WEG reduce design time from four days to one day
With DriveWorks, WEG reduce errors and design time while meeting rigorous quality standards.
WEG is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of electric motors. Each contract requires new and often complex products to be custom-designed, complete with detailed manufacturing data and drawings. Before using DriveWorks, WEG’s projects took longer than desired to complete, were prone to errors, and often did not include updates requested by manufacturing or engineering teams.
WEG chose DriveWorks because it does not require any programming knowledge, and it is easy to set up. With DriveWorks, calculations, databases, engineering procedures, and standards are set up by key users, allowing designers to reuse this captured knowledge every time they need to specify a new custom product. Designers using DriveWorks can enter values into an interface that is easy to use and understand, and incorporate product improvements from across different departments. Modifications are applied without making changes to the master product, ensuring all future products respect the best existing practices.
WEG achieved a return on investment in just six months on their first design automation project. Savings came from reducing rework, fewer errors, and less development time.
With DriveWorks, we can create all drawings and manufacturing data within one day. Using SOLIDWORKS alone, this process used to take three to four days.
Carlos Jose Bastos Grillo, Engineering Manager at WEG Energia
Configure, design, sell, and manufacture custom industrial components faster
DriveWorks technology enables you to accurately configure custom industrial components, 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.