Valve manufacturers are using DriveWorks to save time and optimize their sales processes.
Embracing digital technologies brings many benefits to manufacturers. It helps businesses to stay ahead of their competition and improve traditional processes. The integration of technology into manual business processes enables manufacturers to respond quicker to growing demand, communicate better between teams and customers, and automate error-prone and time-consuming manual tasks.
Read about how valve manufacturers are using DriveWorks software to save time and improve customer experience.
Fresno Valves & Castings
Based in California, USA, Fresno Valves & Castings manufacture some of the world’s leading water control devices. Its product range has expanded over the past 25 years to include water valves, gates, and pipe fittings.
Fresno valves don’t just use DriveWorks for design automation. They are also taking advantage of DriveWorks’ integration capabilities. They can pull information directly from their costing database, which is used to calculate pricing in DriveWorks.
Since the pandemic, raw material pricing has continued to fluctuate. This means the ability to draw relevant information automatically from a database is essential to their quoting process. With DriveWorks handling the quote, drawing, and manufacturing data generation, the engineers at Fresno have more time to focus on research and development.
Before DriveWorks, this full quoting process could take up to 4 weeks. Now, the fully approved specification is sent to the shop floor ready for manufacturing within a day.
Fresno now generate a full quote for a customer within seconds, along with a Bill of Materials and quote drawing. In another 30 minutes, they will have the shop drawing and a BOM sent to their ERP system.
When a customer approves a quote, the salesperson can go back into the system, pick up the quote drawing, and produce the shop drawing automatically, along with the BOM – all through DriveWorks.
“Our order volume has increased so much since adding DriveWorks that our engineering team has more than doubled to handle the amount of requests we receive!”
Sukhbir Singh, Mechanical Engineering Manager, Fresno Valves
Learn more about how Fresno Valves is reducing their quote to manufacture time with DriveWorks Pro:
VanAire Inc
VanAire Inc, headquartered in Gladstone Michigan, develops Engineered Valve Automation Hardware. They make parts that connect valves and actuators on pipelines. VanAire has been using DriveWorks since 2006.
VanAire used DriveWorks first in its engineering team. Engineers with SOLIDWORKS were able to configure new brackets using DriveWorks Pro to generate the manufacturing data.
What used to take 15 to 20 minutes is now cut down to 3 to 4 minutes.
After seeing the benefits of DriveWorks had for its engineers, VanAire expanded DriveWorks’ use to other teams.
The shipping team once used an Excel spreadsheet and a member of the design team to create shipping labels, attach it to the PO, and then send it over to the shipping department. This manual process is now entirely automated, using DriveWorks.
After success automating tasks for the shipping team, VanAire moved on to their next DriveWorks project – integrating DriveWorks with their ERP system. Using DriveWorks, VanAire can create a specification, have it in their ERP system, and print it. Before implementing DriveWorks, this process could take up to two hours, before the information was even created within their ERP system.
The sales team can now run specifications themselves with DriveWorks. This gives the design team more time to focus on innovative R&D projects. Sales team members can also instantly access information, such as the customer’s purchase history. This means they know their customers better, which in turn leads to more positive relationships and continued custom.
Learn more about how WEG have reduced engineering time by 75% with DriveWorks Pro:
VanAire wanted to implement DriveWorks into even more of the company’s systems. After pulling information from their ERP system, they have created a feature-driven costing system. The costing system takes into account specific features and sizing, as well as how long it takes to make the parts. Before implementing DriveWorks, it could take up to a week to get actual costing if it was a big order. Using DriveWorks, VanAire has been able to drop it down to seconds for each part.
“Everything is done automatically and DriveWorks has made that very easy for us, as we used to have lots of issues with the previous manual system.”
Ismael Lopez, CAD Administrator, VanAire
Online Configurator Examples
Our product configurator examples are a great way to see what’s possible with DriveWorks, in a range of scenarios and industries.
DriveWorks product configurator software is used by companies of all sizes. It’s suitable for any industry where quotes or 3D files and drawings are part of the sales to the manufacturing process.
Our configurator examples show how versatile and customizable DriveWorks is and provide great inspiration for your DriveWorks projects.
The software is not limited to what you see in our examples, with DriveWorks you build a custom solution that suits your needs and is easy to maintain and update.
Explore our online configurator examples to see how versatile and easy to use DriveWorks is.
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