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Meyer achieves a new level of transparency by using PRO.FILE as a company-wide product data backbone between the world of CAD and ERP. Time savings, quality improvements, greater operational efficiency, and higher customer satisfaction – that’s how the Revalize solution scores points at the long-established company.
Herbert Meyer GmbH is one of the leading manufacturers of special and series machines for joining and bonding different materials. Meyer systems can be found in the clothing industry as well as at automotive suppliers, shoe and ski manufacturers, in medicine, leather processing, and much more.
The company has been using the SolidWorks CAD system since 1995. CAD data was initially saved at the file level. The design department created bills of materials in Excel, which were then manually entered into the ERP system in the work preparation department. Managing CAD data with Excel lists and in folder structures meant an enormous amount of work.
Linking problems arose when something was moved in Explorer, preventing the company from designing efficiently and thinking in terms of assembly structures.
In 2008, the company decided to implement PRO.FILE as a central management tool for technical and commercial documents. The PDM/PLM solution integrates SolidWorks with the ERP system APplus from Asseco. Now, CAD data can be accessed directly from the APplus workstation. Article master data and bills of materials flow automatically into the APplus data world and processes. Sales, purchasing, and design can create articles in the ERP and transfer them to PRO.FILE after approval. On the other hand, the design department automatically generates bills of materials and parts in the PDM/PLM via a bidirectional interface and transfers them to the ERP. CAD data and drawings, including their PDFs, can be neatly managed in APplus PLM. In the past, everything was created in parallel in several systems. Now the data is collected at the source.
Johann Bierl, Operations Manager at Herbert Meyer, was responsible for the entire implementation of PRO.FILE: “We were also impressed by the process reliability, which means that there are clearly defined areas for everything. The system is cleanly managed and can be administered very well via the management level. Instead of working with code, a lot can be parameterized. It is also impressive how Microsoft BizTalk Server as middleware connects the individual components with each other, thus automating business processes between ERP, PLM, and CAD.”
Before PRO.FILE was implemented, the design department at Herbert Meyer repeatedly had to draw assemblies two or three times because it would have taken far too long to search for existing assemblies. Today, it reuses assemblies by using the “Managed Copy” module, which is also attached to work planning. It copies not only the CAD structure, but also all the drawings and work plans, and automatically adjusts the title blocks. That saves a lot of routine work, especially with very large assemblies.
Herbert Meyer also receives positive feedback from customers: Because the service department can quickly access all the necessary information via PRO.FILE and soon find the required spare parts, customer experience and support have once again improved significantly.
