Centralized enterprise data management results in 70 percent time savings and 30 percent cost savings

Quality products for electrical manufacturing brands

Karnataka Engineering Enterprises (Karnataka Engineering) is a leading manufacturer and supplier of heat exchangers and blowers for the electrical industry in India. The company has established a reputation of excellence in quality among the most respected Indian and foreign manufacturers of generators and electrical motors. Over the last 40 years, some of the most prominent electrical manufacturing brands have chosen Karnataka Engineering to fulfill their heat exchanger requirements. The company’s four manufacturing units are International Organization for Standard-ization (ISO) 9001 certified and are also United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS) accredited.

Karnataka Engineering manufactures a range of products such as closed air circuit water (CACW) and closed air circuit air (CACA) heat exchangers, electrical machine coolers, intercoolers and aftercoolers, oil coolers, thermic heaters and shell and tube heat exchangers. The company also provides heavy fabrication services for transformer tanks, stator frames, motor bodies, shot blasting and Rilsan® coating. Karnataka Engineering also manufactures a variety of fans and blowers such as centrifugal fans and blowers, axial fans and force cooling units. The company has developed ultra-modern infrastructure for engineering, finning, manufacturing and testing of heat exchanger products to serve their electrical manufacturing customers in India and overseas.

Robust data management addresses core business issues

In becoming a partner of choice for many electrical manufacturing brands, Karnataka Engineering faced many data management challenges. Earlier, the company used traditional methods of data management and risked instances of data losses. In the absence of a robust data management system, the company’s personnel stored important design data on external hard drives and individual computers, resulting in a significant amount of important project data being stored in an unstructured manner at insecure locations and devices.

As a result, the data was vulnerable to internal and external threats, unsupervised and unauthorized modifications and even deletion. Data duplication was also a problem. In such a scenario, users usually found it challenging to search and locate the correct project data when it was required. Karnataka Engineering experienced delays that resulted in the escalation of project costs and timelines.

“Our major challenge was to avoid data loss due to the use of traditional data management methods,” says Harsha Chandrashekar, Manager (Engineering), Karnataka Engineering.

To transition from manual data management, secure all important project data and contain time and cost losses, Karnataka Engineering required a system that would solve a few other issues. The company wanted a reliable data management system that would provide solutions to business data management issues, allow data commonization and re-use and facilitate knowledge and intellectual property (IP) management. Karnataka Engineering first tried SolidWorks® Enterprise PDM, but found it inadequate because they wanted to implement all functionalities of a basic product lifecycle management (PLM) solution. Since they also wanted a solution that would allow scalability, the team chose Teamcenter® software from Siemens Digital Industries Software.

Teamcenter enabled Karnataka Engineering to have a centralized design data repository and eliminate all of their data management issues. The entirety of their important project design data was migrated and stored in a structured manner with unique automatically generated document numbers, which solved the data duplication issue. Teamcenter offered robust data security that led to knowledge and IP security and also created an access-controlled environment. With Teamcenter, the company established a secure and scalable system that allowed easy storage, search, retrieval and re-use of data. Teamcenter also enabled Karnataka Engineering to effectively store and manage all data generated by other design tools such as SolidWorks and AutoCAD®.

“Teamcenter gave us a secure and integrated platform through which we can seamless coordinate among our various departments,” says Harsha Chandrashekar.

Teamcenter helps meet business objectives

Karnataka Engineering’s primary objective in seeking a secure centralized design data management solution was to save project time and cost through knowledge and IP security. Teamcenter not only met these objectives but also facilitated seamless data management among the company’s design, production and quality departments across all four of their manufacturing units. The company achieved time savings of 60 to 70 percent and cost savings of 25 to 30 percent while increasing productivity by 25 percent through Teamcenter. Time savings through Teamcenter also created a unique competitive advantage for Karnataka Engineering – they responded faster to requests for quotations (RFQs) and customer queries and also focused on new product development activities.

The DesignTech team helped Karnataka Engineering through the end-to-end PLM implementation, customization and configuration. Siemens Digital Industries Software and DesignTech’s support enabled Karnataka Engineering to achieve their objectives.

“Quick data retrieval and easy revision management has really made our lives easy,” says Harsha Chandrashekar.