Global equipment maker deploys Siemens Digital Industries Software solutions to enhance market competitiveness

Founded in 1993, Top Engineering manufactures liquid-crystal displays (LCDs), light-emitting diodes (LEDs), organic light-emitting diode (OLED) camera modules and semiconductor equipment. The company makes high-quality products and provides advanced equipment to the market. Top Engineering invests heavily in research and development (R&D) to drive product quality and meet customer demands. The company is expanding to include a glass cutting system (GCS) and array tester for LCDs and metal organic chemical vapor phase depositions (MOCVD) as well as camera module equipment and semiconductor testing equipment as Top Engineering continues on its path as a comprehensive equipment maker.

Dispensers, LEDs and testing equipment are tailor-made to customer requests. The company faced difficulties in managing products through after-sales service and maintenance as the processes to secure the necessary materials and determine what other raw materials were needed are very complex. Top Engineering needed an infrastructure to streamline all processes, track issues from product design to advance ordering and check product quality earlier through design review. The company sought an integrated system to control items for specification management and meet production requirements in compliance with international standards.

Particularly in Korea, manufacturing machines that dispense a preconfigured amount of liquid are relatively new compared to Japan and Taiwan. Top Engineering focused on R&D to improve its capability for these machines.

Adopting Siemens Digital Industries Software solutions

When Top Engineering entered the market, the business scale was smaller, making 2D-based design more than sufficient. As the business grew, however, the 2D-based design environment exposed product quality limitations and the inability to keep up with competitors, so the company shifted to 3D-based design to develop machines and adopted Siemens Digital Industries Software’s Solid Edge® software. With this innovative solution, Top Engineering sought to produce a wider variety of prototypes than other companies for diversification to meet market demand and better match the bill of materials (BOM) and real processes when manufacturing customized machines.

Top Engineering also deployed Teamcenter® software, a digital product lifecycle management solution from Siemens, to systematically manage the Solid Edge data and help designers address challenges when changing product specifications.

“With Teamcenter and Solid Edge as our fundamental design platforms, we have improved our engineering processes,” says Joonyoung Kim, managing director, Top Engineering. “We have built a reference process to purchase standardized products and have enabled the revision of manufactured goods, improving overall design quality.”

Siemens Digital Industries Software provided staged strategies to support Top Engineering by focusing on data management when using 3D CAD and building a system to drive efficiency in managing items and libraries. Siemens’ solutions also allowed Top Engineering to improve work efficiency by streamlining the process through data and library management. In addition, Siemens Digital Industries Software also offered multiple tailored trainings to empower Top Engineering’s designers.

Achieving market superiority

Top Engineering experienced immediate benefits with Solid Edge and Teamcenter, enhancing design productivity by 25 percent and reducing design time by 20 percent. As their teams’ design capabilities improved, design quality noticeably increased. Top Engineering achieved 20 percent higher design quality and more patent applications for innovative designs as overall work efficiency improved. All of these breakthroughs resulted in enhanced product competitiveness, allowing Top Engineering to become one of the premier dispenser machine makers in the global market.

While Top Engineering created a library to manage data designed with Solid Edge, managing it was a challenge. Therefore, the company adopted the Insight™ design data management solution provided by Solid Edge. As it had more business units and subsidiaries, product categories were also expanded. To keep up with the changing landscape, Top Engineering deployed Teamcenter to effectively organize the BOM required to manage different specifications and a mass production system. Since deployment, the level of product precision and production efficiency increased as the BOM data became more accurate. Teamcenter is fully compatible with Solid Edge and works in connection with the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, making the ordering process faster and more streamlined. Teamcenter also supports a synchronized design process using 3D embedded technology.

“We were able to minimize defects by checking designs for products that are prone to errors in advance,” says Kim. “Also, the systematic definition of the BOM has allowed us to go through the ordering process more accurately. As a result, we have more time to focus on developing new products and improving machine performance.”

Top Engineering built an infrastructure on Teamcenter where their developers place extra contents, including order specifications, video clips for technology descriptions and key technical documents, and share them to enable more active collaboration among divisions. As Siemens Digital Industries Software is based on open standard technology, it works organically with Top Engineering’s legacy systems. Also, Top Engineering is able to adapt to any industry changes, as formerly individually managed assets such as design know-how and production capacity are now managed through a standardized process.

“With the enhanced data integrity, we now have more confidence in product quality,” says Kim. “We believe that our overall product quality has increased by more than 20 percent.”