Talk about being in the middle of nowhere. Broadwater Mouldings Ltd. is located in such a remote part of the United Kingdom's East Anglia region that it's not even part of a town. The tiny maker of glass reinforced plastic (GRP) moldings sits at the end of the old runway at the World War II Horham B-17 bomber airfield, a throwback to dramatic life-or-death days.
But the stakes are high today, too, if you're a small manufacturer. At a time when even large manufacturers are finding it hard to compete, and offshore manufacturing has forever changed the industry, the smallest manufacturers are in jeopardy of disappearing altogether. To survive, scrappy Broadwater and its 65 employees make a variety of products for a variety of industries including auto-body panel cabinets for Lotus automobiles, magnetic resonance image (MRI) covers for the medical equipment industry and truck mud-guards for gas tanker trucks.
"It's always a good bet to spread your customer base so if one industry is having a tough time you've got your fingers in other pies," says Vince Mortlock, commercial manager for Broadwater. That strategy stood Broadwater in good stead when, two years ago, as Mortlock became the top sales guy, rainmaker, customer service rep and all-purpose manager, the small company faced a major challenge.
One of its top customers, a maker of medical equipment (which Mortlock declined to identify), was designing the next generation of its MRI machine. Having made covers for the previous model, Broadwater bid on the new project. In the past, it had been sufficient for Broadwater to exchange design information manually. "They would give us drawings, which would be interpreted by pattern makers, and we would make patterns. But a lot of that came down to personal interpretation," says Mortlock. Often it was necessary to go back and forth several times before the design was just right. This time, however, the customer would be designing each component of the machine in 3D CAD using Pro/ENGINEER from PTC (Needham, MA).
Suppliers and business partners often use different versions of CAD software, but it is impractical for manufacturers to buy multiple CAD platforms and then have to train people on them. CAD visualization software, earlier versions of which first appeared more than 10 years ago, makes electronic collaboration more feasible.
CAD CREATES COHESION
Thanks to their relative low cost and efficiency, CAD viewers help smaller companies compete. "A little company like Broadwater could not afford to buy all of its customers' CAD systems -- expensive just for the hardware and software, let alone hiring the trained engineers," says Randy Ochs, CEO of Actify Inc. (San Francisco). For medium-size and larger companies, CAD viewers let them share CAD data with people outside engineering. "They want to be able to share the design data with knowledge workers," says Ochs. Actify's installed base of 8,000 is made up of one-quarter small companies, one-half medium-size companies (or business units of larger companies) and one-quarter large companies, according to Lynne Saunders, vice president of marketing for Actify.
Independent vendors like Cimmetry Systems Inc. (recently acquired by Agile Software Corp., San Jose, CA) and Spicer Corp. (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada) sell viewer software that "allows both big and small companies to take data coming in to them from any of the important CAD systems and view it all in one system with one interface. It's much lower cost and much easier to train than using the native CAD applications," says John MacKrell, senior PLM consultant for CIMdata Inc. (Ann Arbor, MI), a consulting company. Major CAD vendors such as Dassault Systemes (Paris) and PTC have their own CAD viewer products.
PLM vendors are beginning to incorporate CAD viewer capabilities into their PLM suites, as seen in Agile's recent acquisition of Cimmetry. For its part, Actify recently introduced its .3D WorkSpace, which allows the user to bundle documents of all types in an electronic folder for easy collaboration.
A FORAY INTO CAD
At the time its MRI equipment customer was making the transition to the PTC 3D CAD program, Broadwater did not have either a CAD program or an employee trained to operate it, and it was hard for the company to justify the expense for a single customer. A temporary alternative was to use the free version of PTC's Pro/E, called Pro/E Desktop. But that turned out to be a short-term fix. "It wasn't giving us what we wanted. It wouldn't open up some files and surfaces. It wasn't very user-friendly," according to Mortlock.
Then Mortlock discovered -- and became an enthusiastic user of -- SpinFire Professional 3D CAD visualization software from Actify. Though he had no training in CAD -- or even much technical expertise in general -- he was able to view 2D or 3D CAD files created in virtually any CAD program from Pro/E to Dassault CATIA to Agile's Unigraphics, see exploded views of the design and perform simple measurements. Mortlock thought SpinFire would come in handy during the bidding/costing process as well as during design and production.
But first, Mortlock had to convince his company to spend roughly $2,000 for the initial purchase, and then $2,000 annually to maintain the application. While that amount may be pocket change to a large operation, to Broadwater it was significant. "I said we had to do it, to show commitment to the customer's project," says Mortlock. Beyond that, the product would help the company view other types of CAD data from its other clients. Broadwater bought one copy of SpinFire Professional 2004. Mortlock trained himself by trying out different commands, and was up and running within a few hours.
According to CIMdata's MacKrell, CAD viewing software has evolved much during its decade-plus on the market. Compression algorithms allow huge design files to be reduced in size by 90% or more for easy sharing over e-mail. "In the viewers themselves, you can change the object's color, you can create a 3-D exploded view where all the screws are out in space and all the parts are pulled apart, but you can't modify the parts themselves. You can't change a surface, though you can make it look different from the color and texture point of view," he says.
Since implementing SpinFire, Broadwater has continued to upgrade its IT infrastructure over the past year or so by purchasing one seat of Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire from PTC and implementing ERP software from Caliach Ltd. (Middlesex, U.K.). The company is now in a better position to serve its large customers and compete against bigger organizations.
THE PAYOFF
Mortlock has found SpinFire to be particularly useful in the costing stage of a project. He can quickly pull up a custom design, check for red flags that would indicate Broadwater could not do the production, check measurements and then compile a quote. SpinFire has helped him shave an average of 50% off the time of responding to requests for quotes. Time-to-prototype has also been cut in half. Mortlock can bring his laptop to customer meetings and pull CAD designs up right then and there. "We can sit around and talk through it. We don't have to go to a workstation," he says.
SpinFire gives instant access to the detailed designs, which for the first time allows Broadwater to generate machining tools for the A (or outward-facing) surfaces while simultaneously beginning the B surfaces (the interface between the product and what it attaches to), according to Mortlock. "You have two things going on at the same time, which would have been impossible before," he says.
Thanks to its own use of CAD software -- as well as increased electronic collaboration -- the medical equipment manufacturer halved its time-to-market with the new MRI model. Where it previously took 12 months to get the new product out of production, with the use of Pro/E and SpinFire and both the medical manufacturer and Broadwater working together, the new model was on the market just six months after creation of the first designs. The customer was so pleased with Broadwater's help in getting to market quickly that it has funneled a lot of new business its way. (The company even went so far as to offer a large piece of its U.S.-based business to Broadwater, but sending the finished product across the pond proved impractical.)
And Broadwater is now using SpinFire Professional in its work with other customers. The investment has been well worthwhile, says Mortlock. "We're just trying to stay in business. This is a fairly low-tech business we're in. But we're trying to offer a bit more to our customers." A final sign of Broadwater's seriousness: At the beginning of this year it took the official plunge into CAD, spending about $5,000 on one license of Pro/E Wildfire and hiring a CAD engineer to operate the platform. Says Mortlock, "We will still use SpinFire. It's just too useful."