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Autodesk Buys Engineer-to-Order Software Developer Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox
Posted on Friday, October 21, 2005 4:00:00 PM |
Autodesk Inc. made its second acquisition this month, snapping up the small, privately held Engineering Intent Corp. in a bid to provide manufacturing customers with an integrated solution to facilitate the mass production of highly customized and configured products.
The acquisition, terms of which were not disclosed, gives San Rafael, CA-based Autodesk engineer-to-order (ETO) software and services, designed to help manufacturers shorten their sales cycles and produce customized end products more efficiently. Autodesk and Engineering Intent of Waltham, MA have been collaborating on customer projects over the last two years, and the smaller firm has already integrated its rules-based engine and ETO system with Autodesk's Inventor CAD tool.
Thus the acquisition, in part driven by customer demand, was a natural fit, said Bob Merlo, Autodesk's vice president of marketing, in an interview with Managing Automation.
With Engineering Intent's ETO software, a manufacturer establishes a baseline of design rules and parameters for their products as part of a rules-driven database. That way, when sales engineers are in the field, they can work directly with customers to establish a custom design, but one that promotes reuse and that can be easily manufactured.
"The sales organization will use it to develop a quote or proposal for a client," Merlo explained. "The reason it's important, especially in highly-configured products, is so your sales team doesn't sell something that isn't engineering feasible or manufacturable. If you don't have a solution like this, customers don't have a baseline at which to operate, and your sales engineers have to start from scratch with every order."
By having pre-approved designs accessible in graphical form at the point of sale, companies are assured that designs sold by a sales engineer can indeed be manufactured efficiently, thus reducing engineering design iterations, minimizing costly errors, and eliminating manufacturing rework.
Hytrol Conveyor Company (Jonesboro, AK) is starting to see just those kind of results. The firm has been working with Autodesk and Engineering Intent for over a year to create an ETO system that will shorten its sales cycles and engineering time by automating re-design for each order.
While Hytrol has 138 standard models of its conveyor systems, over 50% of its orders have some form of customization around those models and another 20% of its business is custom conveyors. "We didn't want to recreate the wheel all over again," explained Stuart Shaw, manager of information systems for Hytrol, in an interview with Managing Automation. "We wanted to come up with a system ... that would save us quite a bit of time in our engineering process, recognizing that we have an existing design to work off of instead of having to recreate it."
The system also allows Hytrol sales engineers to generate a spare parts list for customers during the sales process rather than hitting them up for an additional cost weeks after the sale.
ETO software is a small, but emerging niche, especially as more manufacturers face the need to build highly customized products. (Click here to learn more about ETO software challenges and opportunities.) Most of the major CAD vendors like PTC (Needham, MA) and SolidWorks Corp. (Concord, MA) don't offer an ETO system of their own, but have partnerships with companies to provide those capabilities.
RuleStream Corp. (Wakefield, MA), is another small player in this arena. It recently announced availability of RuleStream 6.0, a new release of its rules-driven product management system that supports Microsoft Corp.'s .NET-based architecture. With the new support, a manufacturer's suppliers can easily participate in a RuleStream environment, securely over the Web. (Click here to attend an on-demand webcast that covers rules-driven product management.)
Autodesk sees the Engineering Intent products having applicability for many of the industries it serves, including its push into the construction industry.
The software will be sold through the company's large network of channel providers, however, they won't initially participate in deployment. Instead, Autodesk's consulting organization will be responsible for this piece of the sale, which Merlo admitted, is a large piece of an ETO deployment.
"The initial startup is the most burdensome," said Merlo, of the effort to establish and populate the database with the design rules. Long term, Autodesk plans to work with the channel to facilitate resellers' abilitites to consult on this level. "The real work to be done to make the channel ready is training and readiness for them to sell the technology, but also to improve their ability to get the content in and the rules base developed," Merlo added.
For Hytrol's Shaw, the Autodesk acquisition provides a measure of comfort in the future of the ETO technology. "We have a better comfort level now that a larger company is backing the technology," Shaw said. "It also gives us more of a comfort level that it will be [more tightly] integrated with Autodesk products that we already use, like Inventor and AutoCAD."
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