Do you know this? You want to draw a new part, create an offer or find the best supplier and start a search in existing data. Despite "powerful" systems, you can't find anything suitable. Yes, actually you know that you have worked on something similar before. But it is now much too time-consuming to search for it for a long time and to check lists. So the whole process is recreated. This is sub-optimal and works much more efficiently.
This is a relevant topic not only in design but also in sales and cost calculation. Optimize your business processes, because after all, it should be fast. The offer as an example must be available to the customer before that of the competitor so that you are more successful. The deadline track starts with the preparation of the offer.
Did you know that you can successively contain and manage all these problems with geometric similarity search software?
What would you do if you knew in a fraction of a second that exactly this project, or one that is 90% similar, already existed and you had all the data at a glance? Material masters, costs, stock availability, technical specifications, similar CAD models - simply everything.
And all this in direct connection with your ERP, PDM, or PLM?
You would probably use the existing component as a starting point and modify it slightly, you would significantly reduce the effort required for your quotation, and you would be able to determine the time and material requirements significantly more precisely. You would be more successful.
Master data accumulates quickly via a wide variety of channels, such as sales, which generates a lot of data records for new offers. This is how a large number of similar or identical offers come together in an ERP system. If you could identify and compare them, that would be a great help. It would also be helpful here if, to stay with the example of Sales, Sales had a powerful software solution for geometric similarity search, which enables the entire data stock to be searched, both for geometric similarities and also for relevant information such as offers, data, etc.
We often hear from our customers that, before you used SIMILIA, tedious browsing through lists of results for similar offers in the ERP was very common. This time-consuming work, which does not exactly increase the company's productivity, should be a thing of the past, especially in sales. Put an end to the creation of superfluous material masters, because inflating the database costs time and money. Avoid superfluous material masters by optimizing the business processes in your company. This will make your business processes simpler, faster, and more effective.
The search for comparable projects from the past is so time-consuming that it is natural to quickly recreate the project or re-create the design in the CAD program due to time constraints. After all, it is done "quickly".
This is a bit exaggerated, but it gets to the core of the matter. From the user's perspective, the effort required to create a new data set is unavoidable. He hardly has a chance to find something suitable in long lists. From the perspective of material master management, the creation of an avoidable article or quotation is a big waste of resources. The part has to run through all process stages after it has been released. In the end, it still gets its own storage location and possibly lies next to its doppelganger. Accordingly, when a quotation is created, an enormous amount of time and effort is spent on costing, feasibility checks, and possibly pre-engineering. This can be avoided by optimizing the business processes.
...the sum of the total effort amounts to more than 10 times the pure design work or pure quotation preparation. With a powerful software solution for searching for similar projects, components, assemblies, or products, this effort can be avoided.
If a user has the possibility to quickly and conveniently find components and data in the entire database, the frequency of the search increases by itself. One now finds data and does not need to search for it. If there is actually nothing suitable, the new data can be created without causing avoidable costs. Consequently, superfluous master data is automatically avoided over time.
Conclusion: With the help of the geometric similarity search, significant cost savings can be realized in sales, cost calculation, as well as in design, and even production, among other areas, which were not even apparent before. Our SIMILIA software pays for itself in a medium-sized company within 12 months and has further potential for expansion. Our customers say again and again:
This is also the case with SIMILIA software from SIMUFORM, which will successfully contribute to the optimization of your business processes.
Cost calculation in mold and tool making
Next time, read how you can save money in cost calculation in mold and tool making and even optimize production line setup times.