Knapheide Improves Efficiency With New Program

April 20, 2007
Dassault Systèmes, a world leader in 3D and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, announced that Knapheide Manufacturing Company has deployed ENOVIA SmarTeam to optimally manage its product information and development processes, including SolidWorks design data.

Dassault Systèmes, a world leader in 3D and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, announced that Knapheide Manufacturing Company has deployed ENOVIA SmarTeam to optimally manage its product information and development processes, including SolidWorks design data.

“ENOVIA SmarTeam has reduced our engineering change order times by 50%, partly through improved access to design data and total visibility into any engineering change order (ECO) by any department at any time,” said Chris Weiss, vice president of engineering at Knapheide. “To maintain our leadership position, we are focused on new product development and engineering. It was critical that we update our manual workflow approach -- our ECOs were taking up to two weeks.”

Knapheide now uses ENOVIA SmarTeam to manage design revisions, bills of material, engineering change orders, and process control, and to foster collaboration across design teams and projects through workflows. Using SmarTeam, Knapheide has improved its ability to capture, control, reuse and prevent duplication of its extremely high volume of design data -- more than 250,000 production drawings.

DS reseller partner InFlow Technology is handling all aspects of Knapheide’s PLM solution implementation. “Our next step is for InFlow to expand data access to our engineers at remote facilities,” added Weiss. “We hope, eventually, to enable collaboration with our suppliers and partners.”