GEMÜ Gebr. Müller Apparatebau GmbH & Co. KG is a leading manufacturer of valves for industrial applications. The specialist produces customer-specific valve, measurement, and control systems down to batch size one. To ensure that processes between sales, engineering, and manufacturing run smoothly and quickly, the company now relies on Tacton Design Automation for Solidworks and integration solutions from configuration specialist Lino GmbH.
In pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, the independent family-owned company GEMÜ is an international technology leader. GEMÜ valves also meet demanding requirements in other industries: depending on the application, they can be controlled with high precision, resist chemically aggressive substances, or be designed for particularly easy cleaning. Combined with other factors such as connection type or RFID chips for traceability, customers choose from thousands of products with millions of different variants. GEMÜ’s own materials and related coverage describe the company as a major valve specialist with highly variant-rich industrial products.
In the previous process landscape, this variety was challenging. Customers filled out a requirements form to the best of their knowledge, specifying parameters such as media, flow rate, connections, and more. To turn this into a concrete product group and the right components, the responsible sales staff needed a great deal of technical and production knowledge. Their product preselection still had to be checked in engineering for plausibility and technical feasibility. Lino’s report on GEMÜ explains that these processes were previously highly knowledge-intensive and required substantial manual validation.
As digital support, the engineering experts mainly relied on queries and formulas in Microsoft Access—for example, to determine final dimensions. Solidworks had also been used for years, including the creation of 2D drawings for customer presentations. However, 3D views for visual product checks or simulations were not possible in Solidworks, and the CAD data could only be used for CNC milling machines in production. GEMÜ’s project report and Lino’s related materials describe the move from isolated tools toward automated design and sales processes.
GEMÜ continues to invest consistently in modern production machinery and expands its machine park in line with company growth. Modern machines depend on fully developed geometry data from 3D models. The time was therefore right for advanced, end-to-end data usage and process automation that would relieve both engineering and sales. As an established solution for design automation in the Solidworks environment, Tacton Design Automation was the obvious choice. The Tacton specialists at Lino GmbH were already familiar to GEMÜ’s decision-makers. Tacton and Lino both position the solution as a way to automate configuration, drawings, and downstream engineering outputs.
Alongside the introduction of fully Solidworks-integrated design automation and the joint creation of the rule set, Lino also handled training for key users. They were to use Tacton directly in the production system and quickly experience for themselves how automation removes recurring, time-consuming design tasks. As a result, variant configuration has seen a major boost: the time previously required to create individual legacy products has been drastically reduced. Today, four product models are completed in the same amount of time, including all data needed for production simulation.
High-revenue valve models were also prepared for sales without delay. To do this, Lino implemented the Tacton Configurator solution together with self-developed add-ons. In combination, sales receives not only meaningful 3D models and drawings for customer presentations, but also rule-based product configuration with pricing (CPQ). Lino’s GEMÜ materials emphasize that these add-ons support a faster quotation process and more reliable customer communication.
As a result, response times after customer inquiries have been reduced to a minimum: the software automatically checks technical feasibility and, in the event of conflicts, suggests solutions. This has massively accelerated the process up to quotation creation, and customers now receive a reliable response including a 3D model and drawing within minutes instead of waiting days or weeks. That speedup is consistent with Lino’s published description of the GEMÜ project.
