Applied Engineering’s Software Development team designed an automated integration tool with you in mind

Manufacturing, Engineering and Design companies all share a common challenge – how to transition the work they do – to the rest of the company. The Engineering, Design and Manufacturing work is the result of customer demand and proposals. And when the work is complete, order management, shipping, billing and customer service are now responsible for that work. We often see a large disconnect during this transition.

Ideally manufactures, engineering and design firms would be able to embed parts lists, bill of materials, cut lists, purchased parts and customer service documentation within the design workflow and then it would seamlessly transfer the operations teams responsible for fulfillment.

Applied Engineering has worked with several firms with varying design software and back-end systems to automate this process. In its simplest form, design models are embedded within documentation which enables it to dynamically change as the product reaches its released state. This enables the documentation to progress as the product is design and provides the customer service team with access to timely and complete documentation.

Engineering models have the capability of containing parts lists, purchase parts, assemblies, bill of materials and hardware components – all of which are very valuable to the rest of the company. Applied Engineering’s software development team designed an automated integration tool which uses the inventory from a company’s ERP to synchronize with a parts and hardware list of a design model. The designers, as they build parts, assemblies, weldments to complete the model, assemble a list of parts, purchase parts and a bill of materials. Once the model and drawings are complete, the design software electronically sends the bill of materials (with its synchronized parts) to the company’s ERP. This enables purchasing to calculate order quantities, accounting to understand cash flow and sales to very quickly generate orders.

We encourage our customers to implement similar strategies to increase the automation, accuracy and visibility these systems enable.