Centralized enterprise data management results in 70 percent time savings and 30 percent cost savings
Case in Point: Karnataka Engineering
At a glance
Focus: Centralized enterprise data management results in 70 percent time savings and 30 percent cost
Challenge: In becoming a partner of choice for many electrical manufacturing brands, Karnataka Engineering faced many data management issues
Approach: To transition from manual data management, secure all important project data and contain time and cost losses, Karnataka Engineering required a system that would solve a few other issues
Impact: Karnataka Engineering’s primary objective in seeking a secure centralized design data management solution was to save project time and cost through knowledge and IP
Siemens PLM Software
Our software provides the technical foundation for our customers’ Digital Enterprise, supporting their transformation. Our software portfolio weaves a digital thread that creates a tapestry of information that connects people with data and applications for real-time, informed decision making.
This digital thread enables our customers to intelligently connect smart virtual models (digital twins) and real-time production information across lifecycle phases of ideation, realization and utilization, and across value chain participants to form a smart innovation environment. This enables our customers to digitalize across their entire ecosystem of products and plants, making it possible for them to realize the enormous benefits of digitalization, including dramatically shortening time-to-market, providing much greater production flexibility and significantly reducing costs.
Siemens PLM Software provides a fully integrated software solution across our customers’ entire value chains, from initial conceptual design, manufacturing planning and execution through service and support of both the products and plants that produce them.
With customers in 90 countries, Siemens PLM Software helps thousands of companies make great products by optimizing their lifecycle processes, from planning and development through manufacturing and support. By digitalizing their entire product lifecycle process, our customers are better equipped to initiate or respond to disruptive innovation in their industries.
Our industry specific approach is validated by the following numbers:
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A total of 14 of the top 15 global vehicle manufacturers use our solutions
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Twenty-two of the top 25 global automotive suppliers use solutions from Siemens PLM Software
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No less than 18 of the top 20 aerospace and defense OEMs use solutions from Siemens PLM Software
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All of the top 20 aircraft engine manufacturers use solutions from Siemens PLM Software
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All but one of the top 30 medical device companies use solutions from Siemens PLM Software
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Four of the top five consumer packaged goods companies use PLM solutions from Siemens PLM Software
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Eight of the top 10 global electronics OEMs use our solutions to drive research and development (R&D) effectiveness and efficiency
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Eight of the top 10 home appliance companies use our solutions to realize end-to-end product lifecycle process optimization
Karnataka Engineering
Karnataka Engineering Enterprises (Karnataka Engineering) is a leading manufacturer and supplier of heat exchangers and blowers for the electrical industry in India. The company has established a reputation of excellence in quality among the most respected Indian and foreign manufacturers of generators and electrical motors. Over the last 40 years, some of the most prominent electrical manufacturing brands have chosen Karnataka Engineering to fulfill their heat exchanger requirements. The company’s four manufacturing units are International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9001 certified and are also United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS) accredited.
Karnataka Engineering manufactures a range of products such as closed air circuit water (CACW) and closed air circuit air (CACA) heat exchangers, electrical machine coolers, intercoolers and aftercoolers, oil coolers, thermic heaters and shell and tube heat exchangers. The company also provides heavy fabrication services for transformer tanks, stator frames, motor bodies, shot blasting and Rilsan® coating. Karnataka Engineering also manufactures a variety of fans and blowers such as centrifugal fans and blowers, axial fans and force cooling units. The company has developed ultramodern infrastructure for engineering, finning, manufacturing and testing of heat exchanger products to serve their electrical manufacturing customers in India and overseas.
Business challenge
In becoming a partner of choice for many electrical manufacturing brands, Karnataka Engineering faced many data management challenges. Earlier, the company used traditional methods of data management and risked instances of data losses. In the absence of a robust data management system, the company’s personnel stored important design data on external hard drives and individual computers, resulting in a significant amount of important project data being stored in an unstructured manner at insecure locations and devices
As a result, the data was vulnerable to internal and external threats, unsupervised and unauthorized modifications and even deletion. Data duplication was also a problem. In such a scenario, users usually found it challenging to search and locate the correct project data when it was required. Karnataka Engineering experienced delays that resulted in the escalation of project costs and timelines.
“Our major challenge was to avoid data loss due to the use of traditional data management methods,” says Harsha Chandrashekar, Manager (Engineering), Karnataka Engineering.
Industry 4.0 solution
To transition from manual data management, secure all important project data and contain time and cost losses, Karnataka Engineering required a system that would solve a few other issues. The company wanted a reliable data management system that would provide solutions to business data management issues, allow data commonization and re-use and facilitate knowledge and intellectual property (IP) management. Karnataka Engineering first tried SolidWorks® Enterprise PDM, but found it inadequate because they wanted to implement all functionalities of a basic product lifecycle management (PLM) solution. Since they also wanted a solution that would allow scalability, the team chose Teamcenter® software from Siemens PLM Software.
Teamcenter enabled Karnataka Engineering to have a centralized design data repository and eliminate all of their data management issues. The entirety of their important project design data was migrated and stored in a structured manner with unique automatically generated document numbers, which solved the data duplication issue. Teamcenter offered robust data security that led to knowledge and IP security and also created an accesscontrolled environment. With Teamcenter, the company established a secure and scalable system that allowed easy storage, search, retrieval and re-use of data. Teamcenter also enabled Karnataka Engineering to effectively store and manage all data generated by other design tools such as SolidWorks and AutoCAD®. “
Teamcenter gave us a secure and integrated platform through which we can seamless coordinate among our various departments,” says Harsha Chandrashekar.
Key benefits
| Area | Outcome |
|---|---|
| Quality | Karnataka Engineering’s primary objective in seeking a secure centralized design data management solution was to save project time and cost through knowledge and IP security. Teamcenter not only met these objectives but also facilitated seamless data management among the company’s design, production and quality departments across all four of their manufacturing units. The company achieved time savings of 60 to 70 percent and cost savings of 25 to 30 percent while increasing productivity by 25 percent through Teamcenter. Time savings through Teamcenter also created a unique competitive advantage for Karnataka Engineering – they responded faster to requests for quotations (RFQs) and customer queries and also focused on new product development activities. |
| Operational Benefit | The DesignTech team helped Karnataka Engineering through the end-to-end PLM implementation, customization and configuration. Siemens PLM Software and DesignTech’s support enabled Karnataka Engineering to achieve their objectives. |
| Visibility & Analytics | “Quick data retrieval and easy revision management has really made our lives easy,” says Harsha Chandrashekar. |