Titan Steel Door - Next-Level Distribution: Drawings on Display
Last month, we continued our story focusing on Titan Steel Door in this blog post, and how, even as a successful manufacturer of steel doors, they had room for improvement under each pillar. In this part of the story, we will continue outlining Titan's journey to CAD efficiency, exploring their data distribution problems and getting to the source of the problem.
The Data Distribution Problem
Titan Steel Door's efficiency and quality control improved greatly just from the adjustments to workflows in the first two pillars, but we didn’t stop at design and data management. As is often the case, we discovered that once files were approved and ready for manufacturing, there was a huge breakdown in the handoff process for approved files. With no version control and central file repository, it's easy to see how this can happen. But addressing the upstream problems didn't solve the issue entirely. Now that files were being created correctly and managed properly in PDM, it was clear that no file handoff workflow had been developed, and the machinists were working off their "best guess" of what the correct file was.
With this knowledge, and an expressed desire for Titan’s production team to only be able to view live, approved drawings electronically via shop-floor tablets, we had a clear picture and a solution in place to achieve their goas—no paper stacks, no manual uploads. If we could pull this off for them, a task that once consumed a full-time resource would now be fully automated.
"I wear out printers, and that burdens efficiencies. The goal is to have tools at workstations to answer questions, instead of a piece of paper that has been passed around by multiple people making notes. Once it's done, I want it to go directly to the next person in the line to finish production. Things that take hours, I want them to take minutes, and minutes take seconds, and second take no time at all."
-Damon Santimauro - President, Titan Steel Door
Stay tuned to learn how we solved Titan Steel Door's CAD Data Distribution problems by deploying a Cloud-hosted data distribution system called Flatter Files, and be sure to catch our monthly webinar series that focuses on each of the 3 Pillars of CAD Data.
