Shotton Lifts Reduce Time Taken to Produce Sales Documents from Half a Day to 30 Minutes Using DriveWorks
Shotton Lifts are working faster and more efficiently with DriveWorks
Shotton Group are a family owned business with four divisions operating across Australia. Established in 1977, they began as suppliers of sheet metal and then diversified to create and sell their own products.
In 2010, the company founded Shotton Lifts, becoming the only local manufacturer of residential, commercial and disabled access lifts in Melbourne, Australia.
We caught up with their Engineering Manager who explained how they used DriveWorks to configure their custom lifts.
Before Implementing DriveWorks
When configuring a new lift, we used to rely on finding a similar lift that we had already modelled in SOLIDWORKS. Wed then package up the project and our engineers would make any modifications manually.
By the end of the process, we would have gigabytes of duplicated SOLIDWORKS files and we never knew if there were any obsolete parts in the models.
We needed a solution that would automate the repetitive tasks, streamline the production of sales documentation and prevent us duplicating data.
Creating Professional Sales Documentation
Now that all of Shotton Lifts forms are generated through DriveWorks, they are much more professional and cohesive. They are able to include more customised fields in the documentation that would have been impractical in the past.
With DriveWorks, the risk of human error has also been greatly reduced and they have eliminated the duplication of data. Previously, an approval drawing could take around half an hour of engineering time and completing other forms would take a couple of hours.
“Using DriveWorks, we’ve reduced the amount of time taken to complete forms from half a day to only 30 minutes”
Automating the Mundane, Saving Time
According to their Engineering Manager, A typical lift contains somewhere in the region of 500- 600 parts and they can be specified into an infinite number of configurations”. This saves time, freeing up engineers to innovate.
Not Just for Engineers
Shotton Group’s engineers use the configurator to specify new lifts and to automate the generation of engineering drawings, whilst the sales team use it to complete forms and to produce professional sales documents, quotes and bills of materials (BOMS).
Importing Data
The Engineering Manager explains how they’re using DriveWorks alongside their ERP system. ”Were currently using the DriveWorks BOM to Excel plugin to import the generated information from an Excel spreadsheet directly in to our ERP system”.
See What You Can Achieve with DriveWorks
Explore our online product configurator examples to see the many different ways DriveWorks can be used for design automation and digital selling.
