ProductCenter PLM Consulting Solutions

Super-Simple Print/View/Find Application to PDFs Keeps Production Primed with Current Information

Company Background:
This very well known, high-end kitchen/bath plumbing products manufacturer has eleven manufacturing facilities throughout North America, producing a wide assortment of plumbing products for homes and business, with product sold throughout the world. The largest of these facilities in Wisconsin operates a vitreous china pottery, a cast iron foundry and enamel shop, a faucet manufacturing operation, and a 200-acre plumbing distribution center. Vitreous china, fiberglass and acrylic plumbing products are also manufactured at facilities in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and Brownwood, Texas.

Situation/Challenge:
The company wanted to implement a product lifecycle management (PLM) solution that would provide a centralized repository for managing its CAD product data and other information produced by other departments such as their Facilities and Technical Publications groups. They had some unique requirements: migration of Interleaf desk top publishing documents to ProductCenter, managing XREF information, setting up a latest-only document repository for Production personnel, and automating conversion of documents so that they could be viewed outside their native application as PDF viewables.

As part of the SofTech Professional Services involvement, ProductCenter was implemented as the central repository for their product data and the following tasks accomplished:

  • Legacy system data migration to ProductCenter
  • Migration of data from their Interleaf relational database management system to capture their technical publications information in ProductCenter
  • Design of a ‘latest-only’ repository of PDFs of drawings with a Web-based ProductCenter Search/View/Print application

Benefits:
Through the results of the efforts of SofTech’s Professional Services, this company was able to achieve:

  • All product associated product data centralized on one system, which saves maintenance and support costs
  • An extremely simple to use Print/View/Find application that enables users, especially in Production, to access/print PDFs of the latest documents without having to utilize more expensive, complex CAD stations or interrupting engineering to get them
  • Production that is always driven to timely, accurate information; no more out-of-date copies of documents stashed away in drawers
ProductCenter PLM Consulting Case Studies

View our SofTech PLM Consulting Service Case Studies for real world examples that we helped to create and implement unique PLM functionality to help further streamline our customer’s PLM efforts.