Autodesk Hytro_ Hytrol
2016-06-08
: Guides Hytrol hytrol success pdf asi
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Hytrol Conveyor
Company, Inc.
Customer Success Story
Autodesk Manufacturing Solutions
Autodesk Inventor®
Autodesk® Intent
AutoCAD® Mechanical
Autodesk® Streamline
Autodesk® Vault
Autodesk® DWF™
Autodesk Consulting
“By implementing the Autodesk manufacturing
solution, we’re enabling our network of
distributors to enter real-time engineer-to-order
sales in the field. We’ll be able to significantly
shorten our sales cycle and engineering time
by automating redesign for each order, BOM
production for manufacturing, and spare parts
lists for our customers.”
Stuart Shaw
Information Systems Manager
Hytrol Conveyor Company
Hytrol Conveyor Puts Engineer-
to-Order Sales in Motion 50%
Faster with Autodesk
With a comprehensive Autodesk manufacturing solution,
Hytrol automates mass product customization at the
point of sale while moving from 2D to 3D design and
adopting a paperless manufacturing process.
Project Summary
Hytrol Conveyor Company depends on Autodesk
to help it solve a pressing business need:
speeding product customization, from the
point of sale to delivery. Autodesk Consulting
has provided Hytrol with insights into how the
company can improve its business processes
using a comprehensive Autodesk solution.
With Autodesk® Intent, the company is driving
toward engineer-to-order (ETO) sales, effectively
shortening its sales cycle and engineering time
on customized products. Using a combination of
AutoCAD® Mechanical and Autodesk Inventor® to
create designs, Hytrol’s engineers are migrating
from 2D design to 3D design. As a result, Hytrol
will be able to vastly improve communication
between engineers and the shop floor, speeding
manufacturing by eliminating errors and reducing
rework. With Autodesk® Vault, Hytrol is able to
effectively manage its 2D and 3D designs and
work in process, while Autodesk® Streamline
has enabled the company to easily share designs
and technical manuals with both employees and
distributors.
The Challenge
Shortening Sales and Design Cycles
Established in 1947, Hytrol Conveyor Company
is now one of the largest manufacturers of
conveyors and conveying systems in the world.
Companies that need to move and sort products
quickly and accurately—such as 3M, Best Foods,
Barnes & Noble, Costco Wholesale, Federal
Express, Ford, Goodyear, Office Max, O’Reilly’s,
R.R. Donnelley, Starbucks, and United Parcel
Service—depend on the computer-controlled
conveyors and automated, high-speed sortation
systems that Hytrol manufacturers to help them
cut material handling costs. Hytrol revolutionized
the industry by offering 24-hour order-to-ship
service on stock products—backed by the promise
of free freight for delivery failures. “Speed to
market has always been one of our strengths and
differentiators,” notes Stuart Shaw, Information
Systems Manager at Hytrol.
To capitalize on this strength and continue
to grow its leadership in an increasingly
competitive global marketplace, Hytrol set its
sights on offering this type of rapid delivery
for highly-customized products as well—a goal
that immediately shed light on the company’s
need for updated sales order, engineering, and
manufacturing processes. “In order to extend
our promise to one-, two-, and four-week items,
we needed to get information from the customer
faster and more accurately than ever before,” says
Shaw. “We then needed an automated process
for taking this information, designing a custom
product, and delivering specifications to the shop
floor.”
Hytrol sought a solution that would help it
address every aspect of its business issue:
designing and delivering a highly-customized
product to market faster. By driving ETO sales
in the field, it would be able to shorten sales
and engineering cycle times. It could speed
manufacturing by automating bill of materials
(BOMs) production. Hytrol also wanted to
streamline parts ordering by offering customers
spare parts lists at the time of order, a change
that would boost customer satisfaction.
And to eliminate costly and time-consuming
manufacturing errors, the company needed a
clear migration path from 2D to 3D so that it could
deliver more production-ready designs to the
shop floor.
The Solution
Comprehensive from End to End
With Autodesk Inventor, Autodesk Intent,
AutoCAD Mechanical, Autodesk Streamline,
Autodesk Vault, Autodesk® DWF™, and Autodesk
Consulting, Hytrol is well-equipped with the
tools and services required to stay on top in the
competitive global market. “By implementing
the Autodesk manufacturing solution, we’re
enabling our network of distributors to enter real-
time engineer-to-order sales in the field,” says
Shaw. “We’ll be able to significantly shorten our
sales cycle and engineering time by automating
redesign for each order, BOM production for
manufacturing, and spare parts lists for our
customers.”
Customizing Products Quickly and Easily
Hytrol sells exclusively through 80 distributors—
representing 600 salespeople—and chose
Autodesk Intent to facilitate ETO sales for all of
its distributors. When Hytrol started looking at
linking all its critical business systems together
it quickly realized the ERP systems on the market
didn’t have the ETO component it required, nor
strong ties into the Autodesk products it was
already using. “Autodesk Intent was a no-brainer
for us,” says Shaw. “It has everything we need for
ETO—functionality that would have taken us two
to three times as long to write ourselves.” Shaw
explains, “By evaluating our business process
needs and incrementally implementing ETO
before an ERP system, we will save thousands
of dollars in rework. Autodesk Intent fit our ETO
needs better than available ERP configuators and
was clearly the most cost-effective choice.”
Autodesk Intent will automate product
customization for Hytrol, enabling the company
to efficiently produce and deliver custom
products rapidly. “Customizing an order is a
complex process because even minor changes
in specifications require validation,” explains
George Williams, Manager of Engineering
at Hytrol. “Autodesk Intent integrates our
engineering specifications, design intelligence,
and rules upfront, so we don’t have to do massive
calculations behind the scenes. It’s done for
us automatically.” By embedding engineering
rules, Autodesk Intent enables sales to achieve
pre-approved designs in the field, reduces design
iterations, minimizes costly errors, and eliminates
manufacturing rework. With reduced lead times
and products moving out the door faster, Hytrol is
better able to meet the growing demand for mass
customization.
Before Autodesk Intent, it was impossible to
deliver final assembly drawings on customized
products to the ordering distributor because
the combinations were astronomical. But
now, distributors are able to view what Hytrol
will deliver at the time of order. “We can use
engineering rules to create assemblies—in an
automated fashion—before they hit the shop
floor,” explains Williams. “That means when
distributors place custom orders, we can show
them exactly what they are ordering before it’s
manufactured.”
The tight integration between Autodesk Intent
and Autodesk Inventor will also help Hytrol
produce engineering documents based on
a distributor’s input, a function that Hytrol
is hoping to leverage soon. “We want to tie
distributor information, engineering rules, and
other parameters directly to our engineering
documents inside of Autodesk Inventor.”
Being able to give customers a spare parts
list upon sale was a big priority for Hytrol’s
distributors. Before Autodesk Intent, it was
virtually impossible for Hytrol to meet this
request. “We had to wait until we built the
conveyor before we knew its spare part content,”
says Shaw. With Autodesk Intent, Hytrol will
be able to build a bill of materials even as
the customer is filling out an order. “Because
part numbers are now connected to design
information, the end customer can buy spare
parts for the conveyors he’s ordering when he
orders them,” adds Shaw. “Autodesk Intent is
instrumental in this process.”
Facilitating Design Creation—in 2D and 3D
Hytrol originally used ME10 from CoCreate
Software, Inc., to create its engineering designs
in 2D. But as it became apparent to Hytrol that
ME10 could not continue to meet its needs,
the company began looking for a replacement
product that would not only deliver the best 2D
design tools immediately, but also offer a clear
path to 3D. Autodesk was the only vendor that
could offer this natural progression between 2D
and 3D design. Three years ago, Hytrol converted
to AutoCAD Mechanical. The company is now
gradually migrating engineers to Autodesk
Inventor, which helps them create more accurate
designs as well as visualize and communicate
design intent more clearly. “Even though 2D is
good, there is still a margin of error in what’s sent
to the shop floor when we design in 2D,” says
Williams. “With 3D, that problem goes away.”
Managing 3D Design Data
As Hytrol migrates to Autodesk Inventor, it’s
beginning to lean on Autodesk Vault for its
data management needs. Initially, the company
planned to develop its own data management
system for 3D data, just as it did to manage
its 2D data. But after viewing Autodesk Vault
capabilities, the company saw no reason to spend
resources creating an in-house solution. “Once we
saw what Vault could do, we backed off,” notes
Williams. “Vault will manage all of our documents
in Inventor, so we can concentrate on design
rather than on worrying whether our newest
internal release is working well for users.”
Integrating Autodesk Vault with its existing PDM
system, Hytrol plans to use Autodesk Vault to
manage, ultimately, all of its engineering work
in process. Autodesk Vault will automatically
generate DWF files that Hytrol’s PDM system can
then serve out to the shop floor. Use of DWF files
for manufacturing and assembly helps transition
Hytrol to a paperless environment—all part of its
initiative to move to lean processes.
Sharing Made Easy
When Hytrol decided it wanted to publish
“The Autodesk mantra is about service—that
means a lot to us. We know Autodesk is
listening, because we can see how they
incorporate our feedback into new products.”
George Williams
Manager of Engineering
Hytrol Conveyor Company
“Autodesk Intent was a no-brainer for us. It had
everything we needed for ETO—functionality
that would have taken us two to three times as
long to write ourselves.”
Stuart Shaw
Information Systems Manager
Hytrol Conveyor Company
“Autodesk Consulting helped us to really look
at, and understand, our business processes
before we started implementing software. They
thought of things we hadn’t considered—they’ve
given us good direction.”
George Williams
Manager of Engineering
Hytrol Conveyor Company
technical documents to distributors and their sales
people over the Internet, it considered creating
its own online publishing service. But when the
company evaluated Autodesk Streamline, it realized
that it could get the functionality it wanted while
saving its software development resources for other
projects.
Implementing Autodesk Streamline was easy—and
the benefits immediate. “The most effort we had to
exert was in deciding which drawings to put on the
web,” says Williams. “It only took one person a little
over a month to actually post everything.” Now,
rather than depending on email to share technical
documents, its distributors’ 600 salespeople and
200 of Hytrol’s employees use Streamline and 3D
DWF files instead. Distributors can also easily access
product manuals for customer installations or service
calls. “Autodesk Streamline has been a great hit with
our distributors,” notes Shaw.
Providing Valuable Insights
Hytrol considers Autodesk a true partner—a fact
underscored by the company’s decision to adjust
course when Autodesk Consulting suggested
alternatives. “Autodesk Consulting helped us to
really look at and understand our business processes
before we started implementing software,” says
Williams. “They thought of things we hadn’t
considered—they’ve given us good direction.”
In a strategic business consulting engagement,
Autodesk Consulting partnered with Hytrol to
identify the areas on which technology could make
a positive impact. “After analyzing and selecting
the right tools to solve our business challenges,
we worked with Autodesk Consulting to define
the architecture of our Autodesk Intent-focused
implementation,” says Shaw. “Autodesk is not just a
software vendor. Through our work with Autodesk’s
Sales and Consulting teams, we’ve come to value
Autodesk as a real business partner.”
The Result
Implementing ETO 50% Faster
Hytrol is successfully transitioning from 2D with
AutoCAD Mechanical to 3D with Autodesk Inventor.
The company’s newest innovation—the EZLogic
GEN3 Dynamic Zone Accumulation system that
controls product spacing on conveyors by sensing
the product size to avoid jams—was done entirely in
Autodesk Inventor.
With the implementation of its comprehensive
Autodesk manufacturing solution, Hytrol also now
has the tools it needs to solve its most pressing
business challenge: mass-producing customized
products quickly and cost-effectively. Autodesk’s
manufacturing solution is bridging the gap ERP
companies could not cross, enabling Hytrol’s
extensive distributor network to enter real-time ETO
sales from the field, automate BOM production for
manufacturing, and generate spare-parts lists at the
point of sale. Autodesk has already helped Hytrol
reduce the number of BOMs it has archived from
25,000 records to just 12 engineering rules.
By automating redesign for each order and reducing
the order management bottleneck in engineering,
Autodesk will also help to trim the sales cycle
and engineering time. And by forgoing internal
development of a customized in-house ETO solution,
Hytrol will be reaping the benefits of increased sales
volume sooner. “With tight integration between all
of Autodesk’s solutions, we are implementing this
system in half the time it would have taken us to
develop a customized solution in house,” notes Shaw.
Autodesk, Autodesk Inventor, Autodesk Intent, AutoCAD Mechanical, Autodesk Streamline, Autodesk Vault, Autodesk DWF are either registered
trademarks or trademarks of Autodesk, Inc., in the USA and/or other countries. All other brand names, product names, or trademarks belong to their
respective holders. Autodesk reserves the right to alter product offerings and specifications at any time without notice, and is not responsible for
typographical or graphical errors that may appear in this document.
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© 2006 Autodesk, Inc. All rights reserved
Hytrol Conveyor
Company, Inc.
Customer Success Story
“Autodesk Streamline has been a great hit
with our distributors.”
Stuart Shaw
Information Systems Manager
Hytrol Conveyor Company
In partnership with Autodesk
Consulting, Autodesk Premier
Solution Provider D3 Technologies
has also provided training and
support for the Autodesk solution
Hytrol adopted. “D3 Technologies
is a true value-added reseller,”
said Williams. “D3 has been a
great resource throughout our
implementation of Inventor 3D
technology. Its staff has trained our
employees, guided us in setting up
our system, and provided expert
technical help. They have helped us
become a better company.”
