The challenge
Green Instruments A/S in Brønderslev, Denmark specializes in the development and production of measuring and analysis equipment for both the marine and land-based industries. In recent years, the company has carried out increasingly larger and more complex development projects and at the same time meet increased demands from customers. This has created a need for better traceability, higher integrity in assembly structures as well as security around design, streamlining of production, and the quality of the technical documentation.
The solution
Better quality in designs, fewer errors, and massive time savings are just a few of the benefits Green Instruments A / S has achieved with the introduction of a PDM solution from PLM Group.
The Danish company Green Instruments in the Northern Jutland town of Brønderslev develops and manufactures measurement and analysis equipment for both marine and land-based industries. The introduction of a HostPLM PDM solution from PLM Group has significantly improved the production of technical documentation as well as workflows in the processes around engineering, manufacturing, and sales.
PDM ensures structured processes
“Overall our work has become much more structured. We have constructed a workflow with revision and version control as well as automatic generation of PDFs and drawing numbers,” explains Technical Designer Thomas Tversted:
“We have a search tool in the PDM system tailored specifically to meet our demands so we are able to search through both old and new products. This has greatly improved the traceability of our products and designs and has resulted in huge time savings for us in our engineering department,” he adds.
No more broken assemblies
The PDM system ensures that assemblies and files are always intact and Green Instruments no longer come across damaged assembly structures.
“One of our previous challenges was to secure our internal references between design files. The PDM system now takes care of that, which means that we completely avoid broken assemblies,” Thomas Tversted explains.
The development projects at Green Instruments are becoming both increasingly complex and larger combined with ever greater demands from the company’s customers. This means that the company depends completely on its designs always being correct. The PDM system helps Green Instruments streamline the designs in a much safer way than before, Thomas Tversted says:
“Our customers experience that our technical documentation has become much more streamlined and as a company, we appear to more professional than before we implemented the PDM solution.”
Lots of benefits in sales and production
Thomas Tversted points out that the PDM solution has produced a number of significant benefits, not only in engineering but also for other departments:
“Our sales and manufacturing departments have gained a great number of benefits from the PDM system. We can provide them with better and more structured designs and the automatic PDF generator automatically saves the PDF files into folders making them very easy to access.”
Professional implementation project
Green Instruments chose PLM Group as a supplier of PDM partly because they were already a supplier of the company’s SOLIDWORKS CAD software while offering a host-based solution in which PLM Group takes care of the daily operation of the host-based PDM system. Thomas Tversted adds:
“Equally important for our choice of PLM Group as a partner was that they presented us with a very professional project plan for our introduction of the system. Their approach suited us really well and the time schedule worked perfectly for us.”
Together with PLM Group, Green Instruments completed a step-by-step based implementation project:
“We learned most about ourselves and our way of working on through the Pre Study. And at the same time, we also learned how much the PDM solution is going to help us in the future, Thomas Tversted says.
He adds that the next step in Green Instruments’ PDM project will be to integrate the PDM solution with the company’s ERP system.
The success
- The introduction of a PDM solution has ensured far better structure in all processes around technical documentation
- Automatic generation of information from the development department to production and sales
- Appears more professional to customers due to better technical documentation
- Tailor-made searching tool provides effective possibilities to search through both older and new designs
- PDM managing the references in 3D models ensures the integrity of designs