The Customer’s Challenge
ME Global, a wholly owned subsidiary of ME Elecmetal, manufactures high-quality components for large-scale mining operations. As a global company, it realized that a comprehensive digital transformation could help it improve quality, product development ingenuity, and cost-efficiency.
When your products can crush rocks the size of cars, thinking big comes naturally. This is exactly how ME Global approached its own digital renovation. The company knew it could manage workflow more efficiently among its 1,000 employees operating on four continents and serving customers in more than 40 countries.
Time is critical for ME Global. Mining companies orchestrate enormous, high-cost operations that run on precise schedules and lose money with every minute of downtime. That means when ME Global commits to delivering a product by a certain date, that deadline MUST be met. Yet, ME Global was relying on a collection of point solutions, spreadsheets, and paper-based processes to manage its daily work.
The Project Goals
Their primary corporate goal aligned with their biggest challenge, which was to positively impact their existing methodologies, including product innovation, design, manufacturing, and timely delivery of the finished product and implementation to the customer. An integral part of the primary goal was to create a “single source of truth” for their design data that would aid in making product design processes more efficient, including Engineering Change Orders (ECO), getting products to market faster, and exceeding customer expectations for predictability.
The Solution
ME Global evaluated several product lifecycle management systems. They needed one that was flexible, accessible from anywhere, and simple to use. They chose Autodesk Fusion 360 Manage combined with Autodesk Vault Professional. The uniting of those two products allowed them to tie processes and data sources together, thus creating that vital “single source of truth” in one place. With all stakeholders plugged into the same source of data and product information, they could be assured that all contributing project team members are on the same page using the same central data source.
The Business Outcome
Of the three big benefits, faster is the most important. The lead time required to manufacture a complete set of “mill-liners” is typically 24 to 26 weeks. They expect the new solution to cut 10 working days out of the schedule in both engineering and the delivery of casting patterns, reducing lead time to 22 to 24 weeks. When the full solution is implemented, ME Global anticipates reducing lead time to 18-20 weeks allowing them to beat their competitors to market with a higher quality product that costs less to make, improving the bottom line.
Since the implementation of the initial phase of the Autodesk solution, ME Global has seen a 49% average reduction in the release time for all ECOs, and that far exceeds their expectations. Because they are experiencing a large increase in customer orders, they expect the 49% average reduction to drop a little simply due to that added workload. They are predicting a small drop of 8%-15% with the increased workload, but even at a 35-40% reduction in ECO release time, their time savings are significant.
Conclusion
Connecting the entire enterprise with a cloud-based PLM solution delivers many advantages for a global organization spread across boundaries, borders, and time zones, using different languages and a mix of communication channels. But it all comes back to the single source of truth that eliminates time spent searching for the right document, the right version, or the right reviewer.
Of course, ME Global isn’t finished with its digital transformation. With a primary emphasis on a “single source of truth” for all data and product information, the next phase will involve integrating the Microsoft Office Suite, scheduling tools, auxiliary file storage, and CRM and ERP systems.
“We evaluated several product lifecycle management systems. We needed one that was flexible, accessible from anywhere, and simple to use. We chose Autodesk Fusion 360 Manage combined with Autodesk Vault Professional. When you’re tying processes and data sources together, there’s no better way to put everything in one place.”
—Michael Best, Engineering Technical Manager, ME Global
