CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
3 November 2008
Implementation Investments
Automotive Tier-One Suppliers Adopt TPM for Faster, Automated Data Translations
Theorem Solutions, Inc. announced the adoption of its Theorem Process Manager (TPM) by several North American automotive suppliers. Among the major automotive suppliers benefiting from the adoption of TPM are the MTU Division of Detroit Diesel and the Cosma Division of Canadian automotive manufacturer Magna International.
Both companies are utilizing TPM to automate the translation of CAD data into formats requested by customers and internal design partners. With a diverse base of customers located across the globe, both companies were suffering from long turnaround times in meeting these data requests. Due to the very large file sizes, many of these translations would tie up computing resources and personnel for prohibitively long periods of time.
TPM was designed to automate any manual, time-intensive batch process or Back Office activities that have historically created bottlenecks for manufacturers. TPM automates, schedules, manages and controls these processes and can be set up to process these tasks during off-hours when most computers and workstations sit idle.
Both MTU and Cosma have reaped significant time and manpower savings as a result of incorporating TPM for automated data translations. Before automating the process at Cosma, the company had five people performing these time-consuming translations. Today that number is down to two people with hopes of reducing that further. When requests for data come in, the data coordinators simply drag and drop the files to the TPM job queue. TPM processes translations on a dedicated server 24 hours a day.
"They are now batching off 25, 50 or 100 files to the server, and then they are going about doing other things," says Dave Truchan, director of Information Technology at Cosma. "I'd be reluctant to say it's a 100% improvement but it almost is, and our overtime is almost non-existent. What used to be considered good to get a two-day turnaround, we're now doing in four to six hours. Our turnaround time now is phenomenal because the data coordinators are doing what they need to do all the time, instead of waiting for their computer to complete a translation. That's been the biggest benefit."
Pricing and Availability: Theorem Process Manager is currently available. To find our more information and obtain current pricing, please contact the company at: 513-576 1100 or submit an inquiry on the company's web site at http://www.theorem.co.uk
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