"We develop the machines for producing plastic pipes entirely in-house and have them built by partner companies to our plans," explains DI Gernot Gradwohl, Head of Engineering.
50 tonnes per pipe section - and a growing volume of data
The production plants for GRP pipes impress first of all through their size and the masses in motion during production: a freshly cast pipe section with a diameter of 3,600 mm weighs around 50 tonnes - without the mold. The engineers design the plants, including electrical and fluid engineering and control programming, with Inventor and AutoCAD.
With new capabilities - simulation right in the design environment, 3D hardware configuration in electrical planning - CAD programs keep getting more powerful. At the same time, the volume and heterogeneity of the data grows. "It has to be preserved in its entirety and be easy to use across the company," says Gernot Gradwohl. "Making it available as needed across the entire product lifecycle serves the simple fulfilment of documentation duties as much as smooth communication with partners, simpler maintenance tasks and the reuse of proven designs in new developments."
Automating release processes
The company uses the PDM/PLM software PRO.FILE for this. The system is not limited to particular data types and includes Office documents, photos and even the scanned brainstorming napkin in the project context.
As the Austrian PRO.FILE Competence Center, trisoft connected the system with all relevant third-party systems, most recently the ERP system. Before that came the migration of around 130,000 documents of the most varied kinds from the previous PDM: CAD data from different systems, scanned drawings, project documents, photos and videos. The old system had to be replaced because the switch to 3D design would have required substantial programming effort in it.
PRO.FILE is now the central data backbone of the company and manages all product-relevant data from the various authoring systems to make it available to users as needed: from requirements through sketches, 3D CAD models and shop drawings to bills of materials and general documents. The PLM software's functions for automating and documenting release processes and their versioning are in use as well.
A traceable data history
The flow of information in engineering companies keeps growing, and a wide variety of IT systems produces an ever larger number of data and documents. Keeping them separate and transferring them manually from one system to another - the classic isolated-tools problem - is a constant source of errors and the reason workflows stall again and again.
That is why many companies today treat PLM and product data management as a topic to be addressed centrally, so that it aligns with the needs of the departments. Handling important documents becomes much simpler: information is filed clearly and found, changed, versioned or marked as deleted faster. Outdated or faulty data is easier to track down and mark as invalid. The data history stays traceable at all times without holding up the development process any more.
Above all, a central PLM platform protects against information being filed multiple times in different systems. That is exactly what bloats the data volume unnecessarily and obscures which version is the current one. With a modern, central PLM platform, each document exists only once in the company. Product development rests on a secured process, and at the same time product creation costs fall through more efficient use of resources.
About Amiblu
Amiblu is a 50:50 joint venture uniting Amiantit Europe (Flowtite technology) and Hobas Europe (WIG Wietersdorfer Holding). As a manufacturer of sustainable GRP pipe systems, Amiblu is the market-leading specialist for GRP solutions for drinking water, irrigation, combined and waste water, hydropower and industry. Hobas specializes in centrifugally cast, Flowtite in filament-wound pipe systems. Headquarters are in Klagenfurt; pipes are produced in Germany, Spain, Poland and Romania, with a research and development center in Norway. Amiblu employs around 1,500 people worldwide.