Eschlböck keeps its Biber designs under control through PLM with PRO.FILE

The Biber 5 is a classic by now. Developed by the Eschlböck family business in 1984, it ushered in the epoch change from conventional shovel wood to fine wood chips for countless timber businesses in Bavaria and Austria. By 2014, Eschlböck had built and sold more than 1,700 units of the disc chipper.

Today the company produces a complete range of wood chippers for an international customer base under the Biber brand - relying entirely on its own know-how: the various wood chipping machines are both designed and manufactured at the company's home in Prambachkirchen, and the manufacturer handles sales and assembly itself as well. As a variant manufacturer, the company operates between small-series and make-to-order production: certain Biber components are identical, others individual, and there is a constant stream of improvements flowing into all models.

PRO.FILE as the central management system

CAD data and bills of materials from Autodesk Inventor used to be filed centrally on a network drive. The problem: parts are often used in different assemblies, and that structure cannot be represented in this level of detail in a file system. So every employee in the design department additionally filed the drawing data for their projects on their own drive. A quick, central overview of the information on all projects was hard to get that way.

"For that you need a central drawing management system for product information, data sheets and purchased parts, which assembly, manufacturing and other departments can access in parallel as needed," explains Reinhard Eschlböck, technical director and son of owner and managing director Rudolf Eschlböck. The management found what it was looking for at trisoft, with the PLM solution PRO.FILE. "Our thinking was to use the PLM solution to filter the part information out of the documents and to continue toward ERP with that data later." The introduction of the PSIpenta ERP solution - by now in production - was deliberately deferred in favour of tackling PLM first.

PLM paves the way toward ERP

The option of managing CAD data with Autodesk Inventor's built-in tools was evaluated first, but discarded, as the CAD partner was not able to provide adequate technical support for it.

Through the structured filing of the complete drawing information in PRO.FILE, the design engineers see exactly what effects an improvement to one component has on other parts. The entire version tree can be inspected, drawing attention to potential later problems while still in the design phase.

All three systems - Autodesk Inventor, PRO.FILE and PSIpenta - work together as one, with the PLM system as the control hub and leading system. Drawings are created in Autodesk Inventor, and the CAD data is stored automatically in the PLM solution early on. During the design phase and its associated workflows they remain in PRO.FILE only. When the design is finished, a review process follows on the four-eyes principle. Via the interface to PSIpenta, the bills of materials are then created or updated in the ERP system; manufacturing creates its production orders from this base data.

Automated incoming invoice processing

"I am a fan of small cycles," says Reinhard Eschlböck. "You try something out on the IT side, have users test it in practice quickly, and can then keep working on new solutions or components with the feedback gained there. trisoft is a partner with whom we can deliver such requirements very well."

For example, automated incoming invoice processing: invoices arriving by post or e-mail are scanned and handed to the PLM software, in which trisoft implemented the necessary review and approval processes and the subsequent import into the payment systems. Via an interface to the ERP system, order-related invoices can also be reconciled automatically with the orders in the ERP.

While initially only the design department worked with PRO.FILE, other areas have joined over time: first manufacturing, which now accesses drawings as well, then purchasing, which maintains commercial data on the components in the system. PRO.FILE has thus grown from a system originally conceived for purely technical documents into a central repository for all kinds of documents from different parts of the company.

About Eschlböck

For generations, inventions and innovations at Eschlböck have served agriculture. A farmer's son from the village of Eschlbach in the municipality of Prambachkirchen founded a business for developing and producing agricultural machinery in 1956. A loader wagon with instant unloading became the most successful patent of company founder Kommerzialrat Rudolf Eschlböck († 2014); the company built its first wood chipping machines in 1978. Today the second and third generations lead the family business hand in hand.