DesIgn ProDuCT news - DPN Staff

22 Design Product News
dpncanada.com June/July 2007
Feature: CAD
Meet the challenge of rising Loonie
with Engineer-To-Order
By Kerry Saumur
This spring, the Canadian dollar soared
over ninety cents U.S. – heights not
seen since the 1970s. That’s good
news to those planning their summer vacations
down south, but many manufacturers
are bracing for declining margins and profits.
With Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty
urging Canadian manufacturers to be more
productive to meet the rising Loonie, what
exactly can be done?
According to the recent Engineer-to-Order
in the Canadian marketplace white paper
by Technology Evaluation Centers (technologyevaluation.com),
Engineer-to-Order
(ETO) solutions can drive manufacturing
efficiencies while holding the line on costs.
Jim McArthur, vice president of Operations
at IST, a Cambridge, ON-based manufacturer
of Once Through Steam Generators
OTSGs help energy producers recover heat from hot gases to generate steam for process use or power production.
(OTSGs) for international customers like
GE and Siemens, sees ETO as a vital tool to
meet challenges like the stronger Canadian
dollar. His company’s OTSGs help energy
producers worldwide generate more money
by recovering heat from hot gases to generate
steam for process or power use.
Designing and detailing an OTSG can
be very time-consuming – requiring from
3000 to 5000 engineering hours over
three months for each contract. In the
past, design rules had not been effectively
shared from project to project, resulting
in a slower ramp-up time and repetition
of work. Ongoing data entry in multiple
applications sometimes resulted in small
Plant south of Seattle in Centralia, WA, uses IST’s Once
Through Steam Generators.
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errors that could hold up the process and
drive up costs. Identifying and ordering all
materials could only be done in bulk at the
end of the design process, meaning work
could not begin until materials arrived and
increased costs due to the rush delivery
requirements.
Like many of our customers, IST relies on
a core engineering team that scales with temporary
staff to meet new orders as required.
ETO enables standardized design rules to
be captured and easily shared, so staff can
spend less time on training and integration
and more time on product design and development.
Knowledge sharing also works the
other way around – a project’s learning and
insight don’t leave when the employee’s term
is up, nor when full-time employees leave to
take on other assignments.
IST’s goal is to reduce the total average
design hours for each Steam Generator project
by 60%. To facilitate integration with
existing systems and spreadsheets, IST has
set up an electronic data interchange (EDI)
to eliminate errors and reduce data entry.
This bridges the gap between Autodesk
Inventor, Autodesk Intent, AutoCAD 2007
software applications, document management,
ERP and Excel programs to allow
for integrated model creation and provide
automatic drawings and bills of materials.
Kerry Saumur is National Sales Manager,
Manufacturing Solutions Division of
Autodesk Canada Co. (autodesk.com).
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