Hauff-Technik GmbH & Co. KG
Germany-based Hauff-Technik GmbH & Co. KG is known far beyond the country’s borders for high-quality solutions when it comes to underground installations of water, electricity, gas or media lines into a building.
Hauff-Technik has the right product for every case – from the foundation to the roof – and seals. In addition to the headquarters in Hermaringen in the Heidenheim district of Baden-Württemberg, Hauff-Technik GmbH & Co. KG has another production site in Switzerland, Hauff-Technik Swiss AG.
The company employs a total of 375 people and supplies the European, Asian and Arab markets with Hauff products – made in Germany.
Innovation and customer proximity are particularly important because with 50,000 unique items per year, Hauff-Technik delivers exactly what the customer wants.
“In order to be able to deliver a high level of individual production in an extremely short time at a fair price, an automation solution must be found!”
– Jörg Schmid , Head of Development and Design at Hauff-Technik GmbH & Co. KG
Automated Custom Products
The Hauff-Technik portfolio includes not only cable and pipe seals, but also complete solutions, such as multi-branch house connections or individual press seals for the reliable sealing of cables and pipes that are or have been placed in core bores or wall sleeves. An individual customer requirement is often associated with a higher design and production effort.
But how do you manage 50,000 individual customer projects per year with an average production time of 24 hours?
The designers at Hauff-Technik have always worked very successfully with the 3D CAD software SOLIDWORKS. With the help of an in-house design guideline, sophisticated design templates and continuously optimized processes, the processing of orders has been significantly accelerated over the years.
However, customer requirements are becoming more and more complex. At the same time, appointment requests are becoming shorter and shorter.
As a rule, a design employee needs around 16-24 hours for the manual design of a component specially designed for the customer. This is time that designers could be spending on important development tasks.
Jörg Schmid, Design and Development Manager at Hauff-Technik, recognized this early on: “In order to be able to deliver a high level of individual production in an extremely short time at a fair price, an automation solution must be found!”
Challenge
Depict countless variants within minutes at the push of a button on the basis of a 3D CAD model.
With simultaneous creation, transfer and management in the ERP system including all production-relevant information and order data as well as common part testing.
Solution
- SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD Premium for construction
- DriveWorks automation software
- SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional for managing design data and process security
- ERPWorks for the synchronization of design data between the ERP system and SOLIDWORKS.
Integrate without Large Detours
The management, Jörg Schmid and his team wanted a solution that went beyond pure construction processing. There are many 3D CAD configurators, but only a few that offer integration with the in-house ERP system and are scalable up to sales.
The choice, therefore, fell quickly on the DriveWorks automation software and the established SOLIDWORKS partner COFFEE.
DriveWorks offers all the advantages of a product configurator, fully integrated in SOLIDWORKS, and the constructions can be connected directly to sales and inventory management.
The creation of models and drawings of products that are the same but different is done automatically in SOLIDWORKS by DriveWorks, including all data and information relevant to production.
In addition, documents accompanying the product (PDFs, Excel, etc.) are created and stored in the PDM system.
“As a SOLIDWORKS designer, it is simply easy because the DriveWorks software is fully integrated.”
– Christos Delikostas , Sub-Project Manager Variant Design , Hauff-Technik GmbH & Co. KG
“DriveWorks has a simple, logical structure and is user-friendly,” says Mr. Christos Delikostas, sub-project manager for variant design, describing his benefit from the additional software: “As a SOLIDWORKS designer, it is simply easy because the software is fully integrated.”
In merchandise management, articles and materials are automatically created and checked using ERPWorks in the ERP system. Characteristics for the calculation for pricing are delivered directly to SAP and a common part check is carried out in order to avoid creating duplicates.
All of this is initiated by just one process and thus saves considerable time and the designers can use the freed resources for new developments.
The sales employee configures the appropriate quotation data directly from SAP and receives the associated production documents and quotation drawings for the customer as a result.
With the introduction of DriveWorks, the throughput time of a complete job is reduced from 16-24 hours to 5 minutes.
“We were already fast, but with DriveWorks we are even faster!”
– Jörg Schmid proudly reports on the successful implementation in close cooperation with the COFFEE GmbH project team.
Production Starts with the Customer
The management of Hauff-Technik GmbH & Co. KG is already thinking a step further, as Jörg Schmid explains:
“The goal should be for the customer to configure the product themself. DriveWorks creates this product in SAP as an article, transfers a status the work preparation.”
“Drawings, as well as production-relevant data, are automatically transferred to production – without manual intervention!”
With the SOLIDWORKS software solutions and with COFFEE as a strong partner, Hauff-Technik GmbH will achieve this goal and we look forward to seeing their progress!
See What You Can Achieve with DriveWorks
Explore our online product configurator examples to see the many different ways DriveWorks can be used for design automation and digital selling.