At its in-house Design & Sales Automation Conference (DSAK) at the Hilton Hotel in Mainz, Lino GmbH brought together numerous industrial pioneers. Their shared interest: finding ways to automate processes from sales to project planning, conceptualization and fabrication using integrated software solutions. Their shared goal: to offer customers innovative and highly variable products using lean business processes – with a minimum of errors and cost and enhanced productivity.
Partner insights
In his keynote address, Gian Paolo Bassi, CEO of Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corp., explained why cutting costs is not enough. Rather, the objective must be to create new value by offering individualized, innovative products. The ability to do so rapidly is a decisive competitive advantage. Bassi observed that with the SolidWorks® 3D-CAD software and the solutions of Tacton and Lino, companies are equipped with key tools for bringing the right product to market at the right moment.
Frederic Laziou, CEO of Tacton Systems AB, presented a similar thesis: globalization has made it virtually impossible to compete on price. Rather, enterprises need to emphasize the value of their products. And this can be conveyed in an extremely convincing manner through radical customer orientation – and corresponding individualization. But, Frederic Laziou emphasized, businesses can only afford and manage such a wealth of variants if it is based on a comprehensively integrated configuration solution.
Field-tested success templates
Several industry-leading users offered insights into their processes and the productive use of software. One such is toy manufacturer Habermaass GmbH, which in future will also use Lino® 3D web for sales configuration of furniture and playgrounds for its HABA® brand. Previously, data from Solidworks had to be entered and maintained on multiple systems. In future, once created, data will be usable in all processes – including for product configuration with 3D visualization – with no media discontinuities. This will make it much easier to demonstrate and implement novel products.
Visualization also plays a big role for US trade show booth builder Orbus LLC. In their case, they value the capability to generate rules-based layouts in a minimum amount of time. By planning layouts using Lino® 3D layout, Orbus designers can generate up to three booth designs per day. The special benefit: the Lino library and the rule set automatically ensure that only feasible designs are generated. This also pays off for the installers, who can depend absolutely on the installation plans.
The most exciting topic of the conference was end-to-end process automation. SEW-Eurodrive, a leading drive technology manufacturer, is currently conducting a pilot project with Lino in which the entire process from design with Solidworks and Tacton Design Automation to sales configuration is simulated using Lino 3D web. The key challenge here is to integrate the new software modules in the organically developed, extremely heterogeneous IT structure between PLM, ERP and Microsoft Excel so as to create transparency and usability.
„We’re currently implementing a pilot project with Tacton Design Automation, TCsite and Lino 3D web for our design and configuration. The DSAK is always an exciting event for us, because it gives us the chance to learn about innovations and new trends first-hand – and we get to talk directly with the developers. We also benefit enormously from sharing with other users.“
Raphael Buck,
Expert Variant Configuration and -management; System and Process Architecture,
SEW-EURODRIVE GmbH & Co. KG, Bruchsal
Read more about DSAK 2018 in the follow-up report. The next Design and Sales Automation Conference is slated for May 22-23, 2019 in Wiesbaden. Sign up here.