Industrial Catalog Provider: Building Engineering Efficiency for Industrial Manufacturers

Manufacturing eCommerce Success: The Power of Strategic Parts Management

Industrial manufacturers are always seeking ways to refine, streamline and improve their processes. In this session of the MFG eCommerce Success workshop, hosts Curt Anderson and Damon Pistulka join Andrew Hood, Zach Kennedy, and Mike Rennie to discuss creative strategies to reduce engineering waste and increase lead generation. See how Zach and Mike worked with Andrew to achieve their goals using powerful tools from CADENAS PARTsolutions.

MAC Trailer: Reducing Design Time by Increasing Engineering Efficiency

MAC Trailer had over 20 years of parts digitally scattered across multiple facilities in the U.S., which meant that each of their locations and engineering departments had its own way of designing and classifying parts. When they tried manually organizing their library to find duplicates, they discovered that they had over a million parts to organize and only two or three people to organize them.

“How are we going to be able to identify all these redundant parts? How are we going to be able to simplify this process and get things out there?” Zach Kennedy, Director Of Information Technology at MAC Trailer, said. “We were really lucky to link up with Andrew [Hood] and PARTsolutions. They provided some great tools that really expedited the process and empowered us to do a lot that we couldn’t do otherwise.”

They started using CADENAS PARTsolutions’ Strategic Parts Management software, which helped them index every engineering file across their multiple servers and automatically find like parts based on geometry rather than the file name.

Graphic with a quote by Zach Kennedy from MAC Trailer

“We had over 1 million parts, and we were able in about a year’s time to go down to about 300,000 parts with very few people working on this project…This tool is going to help us in reducing costs as we move forward because we’re not going to be buying from different suppliers at different facilities. We’re going to be able to have everybody on the same page. That’s the dream.”

“Every engineering manager knows that if you can reduce the part count, you can reduce costs,” Andrew Hood, Manager of Business Development and PLM Solutions at CADENAS PARTsolutions, said. “And so that’s our goal: How can we help you reduce part count? When you bring in a new part, we want to make it as cost-effective as possible, to help you know that the part has already been presented before, that it’s available at this location in the warehouse, so you don’t go off and buy it again. The goal is to reduce costs and reduce that pain of introducing new parts within the design lifecycle.”

 

 

Adaptall Inc.: Streamlining Part Models With an Online Configurator

Mike Rennie, General Manager at Adaptall Inc., was tasked with documenting every part in Adaptall’s system into a CAD format. Realizing it would take years for his small team to detail every single part, he instead used eCATALOGsolutions to convert all of his part drawings into an online configurator. Customers can go onto Adaptall’s website and customize and download a part model themselves, rather than waiting for Adaptall to make the model manually.

Graphic with a quote by Mike Rennie from Adaptall, Inc.“We used to take phone calls, we would draft something up, and it might take a couple of days,” Rennie said. “We would send them something, they would approve it, and it might have to go through their engineering. Now customers can send links of a solid model to their engineering team. It just streamlines everything all the way through. And things like SKUs and standards can be embedded in those solid models. So it just makes things so much easier for us on so many levels. Now that we’ve started the project, I can’t see any other way.”

The online configurator not only streamlines the design process for Adaptall and their customers, but also serves as a marketing tool for Adaptall.

“We’re still a relatively small company…We have to hit a little bit harder than the next guy. So we’ve utilized everything technology-wise, the Internet of Things, to make that happen,” Rennie said.” With a website, you’re not showing your facility size. You can kind of hide behind that, so to speak, or make yourself look larger. So that’s what we’ve done. We used [our website] as a marketing tool to get our name out there and to express our strengths.

 

About B2Btail:

The goal at B2Btail is to help You with Manufacturing eCommerce Success!

How?

By Serving you as a dedicated & trusted resource guide through this treacherous adventure called eCommerce.

The goal is to help you grow sales and connect with new customers.

You can count on the experience and proven strategies at B2Btail to help You on your eCommerce journey.

 

About Exit Your Way:

Many business owners are not ready for sale and don’t know it. The business value is often lower than they want or need, and the business may not be sellable.

Traditional M&A Sell Side Advisors are selling businesses “where is/as is” and not helping clients change their businesses to sell for the money they want or need.

Exit Your Way solves this problem for business owners.

Our combination of increasing value, preparing for sale, and selling businesses gives Exit Your Way clients hands-on support through the entire process to successfully sell their businesses.

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Kelly Obbie

Social Media Coordinator at CADENAS PARTsolutions | A 2018 graduate of The Media School at Indiana University, Kelly studied journalism, public relations, English and Spanish and has experience in news writing and editing as well as social media writing and management. She also has professional and personal experience in videography and photography. She currently lives in Ohio but has lived in four states, and in her free time, she enjoys running, hiking, learning languages, and watching Disney movies.