Managing and Re-using Sheet Metal Part Designs Easy for Budde Sheet Metal Works

Budde Sheet Metal Works Inc., like many job shops, serves hundreds of customers that in turn do business with multiple Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). Being a sub-contractor to a set of other sub-contractors is a highly competitive business. So to stay ahead, Budde implemented new technology to quickly find, re-use and rapidly respond to the market with the wealth of sheet metal designs built up in the past 8 years. The technology jump was seamless and cost virtually nothing.

The Dayton, Ohio-based company’s engineering group, with just a handful of mechanical designers, impressively has punched out more than 70,000 sheet metal parts in the past 8 years for 300 area machine shops that serve larger companies, mostly within the aerospace and automotive industry.

Often Budde is asked to design parts that it may already have completed, six days, six months or six years ago for any one of the 700 companies it directly serves. "I will likely see that part again," said Ryan Gudorf, CAD/CAM manager. "I think I've made that part before, but for what company and where is it?"

Re-use of this impressive volume of new design data would be ideal, but had become cumbersome. "We may be asked to quickly bid on a new design, and I know we have already done that work. But finding it among 70,000 designs across 700 customer file locations takes too much time, assuming we can find it at all. We often times would just design the part again."

Solid Edge Insight web components allow the viewing of a "live" Solid Edge assembly in an Insight/SharePoint Server managed workspace. Budde estimators can see and print the Bill of Material (BOM) or a parts list, as well as the property values for each part, and a 3D graphical representation of the parts of the assembly.

Fortunately, Budde had selected Solid Edge computer-aided design (CAD) software from EDS years ago for its sheet metal design capabilities. With the recent delivery of Solid Edge’s Insight.NET integrated design management capabilities directly into the CAD system, Budde now enjoys a powerful competitive advantage over its competitors.

Because Insight is part of Solid Edge, it was seamless to Budde’s designers and cost almost nothing. Budde’s CAD/CAM department and non-CAD designers alike now have the ability to quickly and easily search for all kinds of properties, Solid Edge or custom. With Insight’s Web Components, Budde estimators outside the CAD group can now find a part from their own PC-based web browser by any number of criteria such as an OEM’s part number, view it and even print the draft file.

Budde personnel now find drafts in one second, a process that formerly took 10 minutes, two hours or never at all. "It all depended on my memory or the memory of others. Plus searching through file cabinets and about 6,000 different folders on the server. If the estimator couldn’t find it in the file cabinet, then he came to the CAD group to look for it. Then we would get back to them if we found it. It was very laborious. Now they can search on their PCs and print out the drafts to re-quote."

"Solid Edge Insight.NET will win business because we can find designs that we have created before regardless of the customer we created it for and respond much more quickly than our competitors." Referring to the ease of implementation, Gudorf called Insight "design management in an hour."

"Before Insight, we were evaluating third-party PDM (product data management) systems and were very frustrated that there was no real solution to our needs," Gudorf said. "Management was all over me because it was so expensive. Our designers found it difficult to use and impossible to implement. A third-party PDM vendor tried to implement it and failed. After wasted time and money, we determined it was all very expensive and solved none of our needs."

Budde invested less than 5 percent of what it would have spent on the third-party system, not even counting the annual software maintenance, update training and software incompatibility delays and costs. "The Solid Edge Insight implementation is successful, with immediate, positive bottom-line results," Gudorf said.

Faster network and no lost files

Immediate access and management of that design data had become critical to Budde’s success. Starting with two PCs and a small network hub, Budde has grown in the last three years to a network with three servers, 21 workstations, and three CNC machines all networked for a faster product life cycle.

Insight’s unique SmartSync technology dramatically reduced the burden Budde designers had placed on the network. Insight allows Budde designers to work within local workstation cache on their designs more frequently while still maintaining design management on a central server. "The company’s computer network has become a lot faster and because we manage updated engineering designs on the server, we also no longer are losing files on local machines," Gudorf said.

Gudorf said Budde also feels comfortable knowing that the Solid Edge Insight solution is built on current and well-planned Microsoft.NET database technology rather than non-standard, underpowered or non-existent database systems they had evaluated.

About Budde Sheet Metal

Budde Sheet Metal is a full service sheet metal job shop founded in 1922 by Leo Budde. The firm rode out the Depression with a furnace and tin shop. But by WW II, Budde had gained specialty skills needed to help build experimental and replacement parts for aircraft at the Army Air Corp's Dayton modification center (now part of Wright Patterson Air Force Base). Budde has been in the specialty business ever since. Technological advances of the last several years have been embraced and invested by Budde in order to provide its customers with even more diversified capabilities, improved quality, at a cheaper and faster delivery cycle. 

Budde Sheet Metal Works over the last 80 years has become uniquely qualified in the interesting world of "close tolerance" specialties and industrial sheet metal. Budde has more than 350 years of sheet metal problem solving experience in house. The company’s specialties include (but are not limited to), machine guards; control boxes; tanks; pans; chutes; chassis; frames; ventilation/exhaust systems: particle/fume management systems; and all manner of duct work.

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