Industrial Magnetics Enhancing Their Automation Journey Through DriveWorks
IMI is an industry leader in providing both permanent magnets and electromagnets for work holding, lifting, fixturing, conveying and magnetic separation. The company specializes in providing personalized service, innovative solutions, and custom fabrication designing, engineering and manufacturing industrial-grade magnetic products to meet customers specific requirements.
One of our Value Added Resellers, Fisher Unitechworked with Industrial Magnetics to learn more about how DriveWorks serves as the company’s automation operating system for tasks ranging from the creation of 3D models and detailed drawings to the generation of quotes and even Bills of Materials for manufacturing.
Choosing a Solution
A significant piece of IMIs business is creating custom products per customer requests. With hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of legacy models, keeping pace with design changes to support these customizations while maintaining the desired pace for standard product releases proved challenging.
Already usingSOLIDWORKS 3D CADsoftware, IMI wanted to take an integrated approach to improve operations, with tools to accelerate product development, reduce the cost of custom designs and orders, enhance product quality and provide fast responses to customer requests.
With the help of Fisher Unitech, IMI decided DriveWorks wasthe best software for their needs.
We pride ourselves on building just about anything to meet a customers needs and were looking for efficiency improvements to work smarter and faster.
-David Dewey, Engineer with Industrial Magnetics.
Fisher Unitech was instrumental in helping us get this project off the ground. Their technical team had the ability to shift from the minutia of clarifying product specifications, to helping us navigate the culture change of this deployment, showing an impressive range of skills and support.
–David Dewey, Engineer with Industrial Magnetics.
Automating Away the Mundane
IMI is a middle market, privately-held corporation, which has cultivated a culture that values and supports the talents of its employees. The company recognizes that tapping into the creativity of its staff plays a key role in maintaining the companys success supporting a trajectory of 10 percent year-over-year revenue growth.
Customers can now see exactly what was configured and what they will receive, long before engineering has to sink the time in to generate a complete model with full production details.
– David Dewey, Engineer with Industrial Magnetics.
Reducing a Four Minute Task to One Click
With DriveWorks at the core, the company has integrated its CRM and ERP system, creating a centralized platform to support day-to-day operations.
Everyone in the process stream customers, sales, engineering and manufacturing can now see the same information, said Dewey. DriveWorks serves as the interface to all our business systems, tools, models, terminology and users.
As a result of the integration of DriveWorks and SOLIDWORKS with the companys ERP system, IMI cut the task of creating a Bill of Materials down to a single click from within SOLIDWORKS a step that used to take up to four minutes and was conducted by all eight engineers multiple times per day. Now, the process is automated, adding in extra layers of error checking and streamlining the steps to eliminate manual intervention.
Expanding Automation Company-Wide
IMIs long-term goal is to expand its use of DriveWorks and SOLIDWORKS, adding more users along the way looking for opportunities to automate mundane or error-prone processes within engineering, marketing, sales and management.
Our team at Fisher Unitech said to think of DriveWorks not as an app, but as a development environment, said Dewey. Our company has embraced that philosophy, giving us the power and freedom to create tools that help us work better and smarter across the board. And, were just getting started.
Giving us the power and freedom to create tools that help us work better and smarter across the board. And, were just getting started.
Read More: Fisher Unitech
Suitable for Any Industry
DriveWorks product configurator software is used by companies of all sizes. It’s suitable for any industry where quotes or 3D files and drawings are part of the sales to manufacturing process.
See how versatile and customizable it is by having a go with our online configurator examples on www.driveworkslive.com
