Technical Article

Manufacturing companies invest millions in CAD systems, PDM platforms, and ERP software. And yet an engineer still transfers part numbers and bills of materials by hand from one system to another. This is not an isolated case. It is standard practice across a large share of the German machinery industry, and it costs more than the original software investment combined.

Organizations in mechanical and plant engineering that deal daily with the same product data being maintained separately across CAD, PDM, ERP, and CRM systems know the consequences: errors that propagate through the entire order processing chain and engineers spending their time on routine tasks rather than advancing product development. According to an internal analysis of Lino customer projects, up to 30% of all errors in typical engineering processes originate from redundant, manual data entries between systems. These errors are not the result of insufficient diligence — they are the result of a process architecture built on manual data transfer. Engineering Automation addresses this challenge directly: a data-driven automation solution that integrates seamlessly into the existing system architecture and connects four essential automation layers into a continuous process chain.

Assembly changes that only surface on site cost three to five times the original planning expenditure in mechanical and plant engineering. Yet many companies still deliver abstract 2D floor plans to their customers — plans that capture neither heights nor potential collisions. This is not an expression of efficiency. It is a structural competitive disadvantage — and it is fixable.

Any manufacturer still asking its engineers to model standard variants by hand and type metadata into a PDM system one field at a time is not wasting money. It is wasting engineering judgement. That distinction matters.

Anyone who still removes screws, holes, and internal assemblies manually from a SolidWorks model before sending it to a supplier is paying a price—in terms of labor hours, the risk of errors, and tied-up engineering capacity. This process can be automated. And there’s no good reason to wait.