Cleaning the Data Dump

PTC handles Quebec manufacturer’s assembly designs and data management

By André Voshart | Aug-Sept Preview

The Expert 2000 Helping Hand for refuse or recycling collection is one of Labrie's most popular products.

While the name Labrie dates from 1933, Labrie Equipment was put into high gear in 1971, becoming a major manufacturer of trucks for the solid waste industry.

The company, however, has seen significant changes in recent years, following a slew of acquisitions between 2004 and 2006. Today, the newly created Labrie Environmental Group is a top tier manufacturer, whose brands include Labrie, Leach and Wittke. The group also makes Juggler solid/liquid separating units and Industrial Lifters tippers and lifters.

In October 2006, the Saint-Nicolas, Que.-based company consolidated all its brands under one corporate umbrella. With such diverse product offerings coming from different places, the company found that it needed to change the way it managed its 3D data.

When it came to choosing the ideal PLM implementation, CAD/PDM administrator Marc-André Verville says they picked PTC Windchill PDMLink in part because Labrie had already standardized its 3D design on Pro/ENGINEER. Another selling point was the modularity and expansion available with other PTC products, such as Windchill MPMLink, which syncs manufacturing process management with engineering.

“It’s really important to have a PLM solution that will be 100 percent compatible,” he says, “In my experience—and that of people I know in other companies and friends of mine—when you don’t have same brand of PDM from the same company as your MCAD software, you can sometimes have difficulties with compatibility.”

PDMLink, PTC’s product data management system, helps manufacturers, like Labrie, manage all of its product information and allows its engineering team to share information and collaborate during product development through a virtual workspace. In addition, Verville says that, with PDMLink’s powerful search engine, finding parts and assemblies is as easy as searching the net with Google.

All data transmission between the Windchill server and end users is handled through the HTTP protocol; so on the client’s end a web browser is all that is needed. He says it’s also useful for communicating changes to product managers when they are on the road; all they need is Internet access and they can open a 3D model in the integrated ProductView viewer, explode an assembly and annotate new designs to communicate changes.

PDMLink is based on PTC’s Windchill Engine. Unlike traditional two-tiered systems that work on a client/server model, Windchill uses a three-tiered structure, in which the Windchill server acts as an intermediary between the database and the client interface. This configuration reduces the chances of security or corruption issues since users don’t update the database directly. For example, if a client machine goes down during system use, it doesn’t damage the database.

While Labrie recognizes the power and importance of implementing a PDM system, the company hasn’t rushed the implementation, Verville says. Instead, he says he spent his first four months on the job evaluating of the company’s internal processes before making any changes or implementing new processes.

“Because the software itself can do many things, you have to know what you want,” he says. “Most of the time with these powerful tools, people don’t know what they want.”

In part, the rollout process has been eased by the fact that Labrie had been using Pro/INTRALINK, a similar PTC data management program, before upgrading to PDMLink to manage its design data. The company launched its new system in May but Verville says moving the project forward in small, manageable steps is key.

With PDMLink's ProductView, engineers can add notations to product designs, such as to this Expert 2000 collection unit.

In the first stage, he implemented a new data management process for CAD documents as well as a new workflow for drawing approval. The drawing approval, he says, was harder for people get used to because it was reinventing the established engineering work processes.

“We can’t implement everything full blast,” he explains. “We have to give users time to work with it and get used to it. That’s very important.”

Down the line, when users get used to these new processes, Verville says he’ll implement additional workflows for part creation, manage different BOMs (engineering BOMs versus manufacturing BOMs) and change management.

Since Labrie is still in the early stages of its rollout, Verville says it’s too soon to list the improvements made. However, he has a history making these types of implementations work and has seen the immediately noticeable benefits a properly configured PDM system can bring. Prior to Labrie, Verville worked as CAD administrator at Venmar Ventilation, a Drummondville, Que.-based manufacturer of indoor air-quality products, which had struggled to handle files generated by multiple product development teams.

Unlike Labrie, Venmar’s product development teams saved design files in shared folders on a server before the company’s PDM deployment. File overwrites happened all too often, making it difficult for the company to track design revisions. “It was also sometimes painful to find information about a product,” he says.

With Windchill managing all its product data, Venmar reduced product time-to-market from 24 months to 18 months, by automating workflow for drawing approvals, and ensuring that documents cannot be overwritten, making it easier to track revisions.

So with these Windchill implementations in hand, he explains that companies need someone like him who knows a company’s internal processes and can develop, analyze and work with people to make them think a little bit about which workflows changes will make their lives easier not only for the short term but the long term as well.

“Sometimes you implement a new process that seems to slow down everybody, and not all engineers want to accept those new changes,” he says. “But after a few months—when they see the benefits—they begin to like it and they don’t want to go back to where they were before.”
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