MAC Trailer is a manufacturer of customizable trailers, including dump, flatbed, drop-deck and several other configurations. The company, started in 1992, has grown its operational footprint to over 1.5 million square feet of facilities across the United States. With its rapid growth and ever-increasing demand from customers, MAC Trailer’s database of parts that its engineers had designed topped 1,300,000 discrete 3D files. Leadership recognized that many parts were duplicated and reproduced day-to-day but there was no efficient way to sift through the parts and determine what could be deleted. Finally, they found Teamcenter and CADENAS PARTtsolution and together they managed to reduce their database to just 300,000 parts that are easily searchable. Watch their story.
Duplicate CAD parts are created because an engineer either can’t find a part or because they are unaware of an existing part in their company’s inventory. In some cases, as it was at MAC Trailer before Teamcenter adoption, it was simply faster to redraw a part rather than find the existing part in a maze of folders on a server. This led to 1,000,000 unnecessary parts existing in their database.
To eliminate duplicated CAD parts, PLM software is used to analyze all existing parts and compare them to the rest of the database. From that point forward the database can be used to quickly decipher what is necessary to keep and what can be eliminated. When MAC Trailer implemented Cadenas Partsolutions and Siemens Teamcenter they were able to index their existing parts, compare their parts and then re-index unique parts in Teamcenter.
Product lifecycle management (PLM) helps companies manage, find, share, and re-use data across design centers from a single, secure source. Everything that is related to your product, including electrical, mechanical, software, and simulation data, are managed within your PLM tool. This deep integration enables multi-domain BOM and a complete digital twin.
With a single source of truth, engineers can spend more time working on what is important rather than seeking answers to questions and stumbling through.