The company has been managing bills of materials and CAD data from design with product lifecycle management software for several years. Its technical partner is trisoft, who installed the PRO.FILE system from Karlsruhe-based vendor PROCAD at Bauer and also took on the coordination between users, processes and products.
Digitalization across five continents
Digitalization has long been an important topic for Bauer too - especially for a global technology leader with subsidiaries and sales companies on all five continents. The more information is available digitally and centrally, the higher the transparency, the better data and documents can be shared. And the more smoothly collaboration flows between individual group divisions and employees, even when they are not in the same place.
It is no longer just about purely technical CAD models and drawings, but about all records connected with designing and manufacturing a plant: patents, incoming invoices, e-mails, contracts, general commercial documents, plus template management to ISO. As the Austrian Competence Center for PRO.FILE, trisoft can represent exactly this variety with its PLM solution: PRO.FILE covers all the functions of a document management system and takes care of preserving, consolidating and archiving technical data and records across the entire product lifecycle.
"What mattered to us was combining document management and product data management in one application across companies," explains Christian Bucher, Head of IT at Röhren- und Pumpenwerk Bauer GmbH. "With PRO.FILE we found the right system for us, and with trisoft a reliable partner for a successful implementation."
Efficiency up by as much as 77 percent
With the PLM/DMS solution, the plant builder realized cross-departmental document filing and record archiving - for all records: incoming and outgoing invoices, freight documents and more. The central filing quickly revealed similar and duplicate parts, which could then be eliminated.
trisoft also set up a parameter-driven part search for Bauer. If a part cannot be found or is not in stock, PRO.FILE automatically suggests similar parts. The efficiency gain from central filing is enormous, especially for the design departments: with all relevant information and data now easy to find, design time has fallen by up to 77 percent in some areas.
Bauer creates consistent documents through new template management. All templates are managed in one central place; access rights and a stored workflow determine who may edit them and who must approve them. Versioning makes every change traceable, and users can clearly see which template is the currently valid one.
Change management: cause and effect become traceable
Integrated review and approval processes at the plant builder start from the central document filing. For invoices, they end in automated posting in the ERP and accounting system. Workflow techniques for process design, templates, ready-made procedures, cockpits, reports and menus for operating, monitoring and controlling processes come together in PRO.FILE's preconfigured application packages.
Building on the product data, documents and process control information, the "change management" package standardizes the change process, automates documentation, formalizes decision-making and ensures process transparency - cause and effect become traceable. An integrated escalation model kicks in when deadlines slip. The current status of a change is visible in a cockpit, and documentation and the Engineering Change Notification are created automatically. Project participants can also monitor lead times and response times this way.
Synchronizing bills of materials
To keep production processes in machine and plant engineering as error-free as possible, bills of materials in the ERP system should have the same structure as in the CAD/PLM environment. The two IT systems must therefore be synchronized. The PLM software takes care of this by handing bills of materials from CAD/PLM to the ERP automatically. Parts and bills of materials in the ERP are thus created in a process-driven, automated way and kept permanently up to date.