CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
9 September 2004
Implementation Investments
SofTech's ProductCenter PLM Streamlines TurboCare's Engineer-to-Order Product Development
SofTech, Inc. announced that TurboCare's use of SofTech's ProductCenterT PLM (product lifecycle management) solution helps create unique competitive differentiation for the company, improving customer responsiveness and accelerating product delivery during periods of peak demand for its products.
TurboCare is an international aftermarket supplier of support and replacement parts for nearly all turbomachinery in operation today. With deregulation, TurboCare's customers, which are the major utility companies, must optimize operation of older plants and improve the performance of older steam and gas turbines to remain competitive.
TurboCare parts are primarily engineered-to-order and are continually refined to optimize performance. "Very few of our products are off-the-shelf," states Rich Laroche, Systems Integration Manager at TurboCare. "Our niche is knowing what modifications have been done on a turbine and being able to satisfy our customers' needs quicker and more cost effectively than our competition." For the fastest turnaround, it is important to have accurate and complete customer product information at the fingertips of TurboCare's sales and engineering staffs and to maximize reuse of existing product designs and information whenever possible.
Since its implementation, ProductCenter has met TurboCare's three critical goals for implementing PLM company-wide to help the company achieve these efficiencies:
• With facilities worldwide, ProductCenter has successfully brought TurboCare's dispersed engineering groups' design capabilities together, helping the company to perform as a single, well-coordinated enterprise and improving coordination when multiple facilities collaborate on projects.
• ProductCenter has provided TurboCare the capability of knowing exactly what has been made for every customer at any point in time. In the past, proposal teams relied on researchers to search out information regarding customers' installations. Now, using ProductCenter, TurboCare can quickly find out what has been done on previous efforts right in ProductCenter, reducing proposal response time and improving reuse of product data.
• The third goal that has been met with ProductCenter is to provide consistent version/review control across the company, with mechanisms in place to communicate changes to everyone involved. Today with ProductCenter, everyone works with current product information and knows if there are pending changes. Errors that might have slipped through the crack and caused delays in the past have been eliminated.
In addition, it has become apparent that ProductCenter is also very adaptable and easily integrated into an existing engineering environment. For example, TurboCare recently created a unique integration between ProductCenter and its Epicor® Vantage® enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. This new automated integration is expected to save the company considerable time in creating drawings for new product designs.
Especially important during peak times, there will be much less human intervention, data entry steps, chance for error, and time taken to produce drawings. TurboCare plans to take these process efficiencies one step further with ProductCenterT Workflow to automate drawing approvals and other product processes to continue to enhance its competitive edge.
For the full customer case study on TurboCare's use of and competitive advantages gained with ProductCenter visit SofTech's Web site at http://www.softech.com
TurboCare is a provider of repair services and replacement parts for virtually all designs of turbomachinery, and specializes in the design, manufacture and application of engineered components and repair upgrades. TurboCare is a division of Demag Delaval, a wholly owned subsidiary of Siemens Westinghouse Power Corporation.
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