In an inexorably demanding market environment, a publicly traded OEM sought improvements from a particular supplier. The OEM relied on the supplier for both engineering solutions and manufacturing of vital product components. But several problems threatened the relationship. Unforeseen costs were making planning difficult. Delays were impairing the OEM’s new product schedule. Something had to change. The OEM decided the relationship and processes between both parties required a revamp.

If the revamp effort failed, the supplier’s difficulties would likely damage the OEM’s reputation as an innovator and market leader. The OEM wanted to decrease spend and reign in delays. The OEM asked Cadonix about interceding with a possible solution. We brought about that solution through our Arcadia cloud ECAD suite.

CHALLENGE

Lag times had been increasing for components that were crucial to the OEM’s products. Further examination by Cadonix found that the supplier was lacking key best practices. Simply stated, the supplier had some bad habits. First and foremost, the design process failed at considering the future accessibility of parts that went into manufacturing the OEM components. Several vital parts were becoming unavailable for long periods of time, or availability disappeared altogether.

The OEM had tried searching out and suggesting substitute parts, but the hard-to-find parts had gone through several stages of the QA approval process. Resistance from the supplier’s QA team made swapping parts nearly impossible.

A renewal from the ground-up was necessary. All things considered, the OEM desired a continuing business relationship with the supplier. To that end, Cadonix found that a need existed for closer supervision of the supplier’s process.

THE CLOUD MOVES IN

The end goal was to improve communication between the OEM and the supplier and give real-time access to the engineering process. Labour cost was a consideration. The improvements could not end up becoming an excessive expense because of a need for traffic managers. Also, the use of pdfs and other paper communications could result in more approval delays. That would have made a bad situation worse.

Cadonix implemented a solution using Arcadia cloud ECAD as a communication, design, and component database tool. We created an efficient ecosystem between the OEM and the supplier. Interactions began taking place in the cloud, eliminating any need for increased paperwork or traffic management between the two parties.

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The cloud shared database feature allowed the OEM to know a part’s supply reliability and pricing immediately. This rectified the component cost planning problem for the OEM. Subsequently, the supplier synchronised their database with the OEM through Arcadia and only used preferred parts in the components’ redesign.

In the end, the OEM met their goal of solving the problems of parts supply, cost estimation, and lag time while retaining the supplier.

Arcadia’s design-checking feature ensured that the supplier’s drawings incorporated the greatest possible number of parts that were readily available. This ended up reducing labour for both the OEM and the supplier. The increased efficiency and understanding between both parties eliminated the lag time problem.

The OEM met their release schedule for the next five product releases. Overall costs were reduced by 15% when aggregating those five releases. In the end, the OEM met their goal of solving the problems of parts supply, cost estimation, and lag time while retaining the supplier.

OUR SOLUTION FOR YOU

I so so confident that if your business is ready to take the leap on to a cutting edge tool suite and start leveraging the cloud we can help you realise a world class solution you can contact me personally, Cadonix Co-Founder and CTO Andrew Armstrong and I will tell you how.

Even if you are not ready for a fully integrated system, get in touch, Arcadia is used globally by hundreds of design engineers to produce their electrical designs in almost any field imaginable. Be part of the growing number of users of our browser based technologies from all segments including autonomous transport, electric vehicles, satellite, motor-sports, medical and air conditioners!

For more information head on over to https://www.cadonix.com or contact sales@cadonix.com and ask how we can start your business transformation.