How motion06 Connects Sales with Engineering and Production
Configuring a belt curve for a baggage handling system used to take up to 30 hours at motion06. Today it takes 10 minutes.
Conveyor system configuration: a modular business under project pressure
Anyone who builds conveyor systems rarely sells a finished product. Manufacturers assemble systems from standardized modules: belt curves, drives, gearboxes, support structures. Every project requires its own lengths, radii and loads, and every hall sets its own limits: column spacing, roof trusses, utility routes. According to industry experience, a quotation goes through three to five loops between sales, project planning and engineering and usually takes weeks. For cranes and hoists, standards such as EN 15011 and EN 14492 add requirements that every configuration must meet.
Starting point at motion06
The Austrian machine and plant manufacturer motion06 builds transport modules and baggage handling machines. Its customers include more than 70 airports worldwide and distributors such as DHL and UPS. The company grew faster than its processes. Sales and engineering configured and calculated belt curves in Excel with a simple set of rules, planned plant layouts in Solidworks® and had no reliable connection to the ERP system.
The configuration itself is demanding because curve design, drive unit and gearbox type depend on one another. Anyone who changes one parameter has to recheck the others. In airport projects, there is hardly any time for that.
What Lino optimized for motion06
motion06 developed a digitalization strategy with an end-to-end chain from sales through project planning and engineering to production, without breaks between systems. Lino delivered solutions from a single source: configuration and calculation, automated design and plant layout planning. Lino also implemented the ERP integration. Details are in the case study.
How it works today: Sales configures the belt curve and calculates it. The design is generated automatically from the configuration result. Plant layout planning and the ERP system use the same data. The system then releases the result in PDM automatically and passes it on to purchasing.
Results in numbers
- Configuring a belt curve: previously up to 30 hours, now only 10 minutes.
- Entire process up to automatic PDM release and handover to purchasing: barely one hour.
- Sales staff configure even complex products directly at the customer’s site, including approval and an individual quotation.
According to motion06’s head of engineering, around 500 variants of the curved belt conveyors were created in the first year alone. The speed-up equals the working time of two colleagues, who can now focus on core tasks.
Classification
The example shows the principle of Engineering Automation: a company defines configuration rules and design logic once and then lets them run automatically. Simply connecting systems is not enough. What matters is a set of rules that determines how the systems behave. Lino Hub serves as the integration platform that connects CPQ, CAD, ERP and PDM through standardized connectors.
