Leading Global Automotive Interiors Supplier

With hundreds of clients and thousands of individuals collaborating to create their winning designs, the growing company found using spreadsheets to manage users and design information increasingly untenable. Furthermore, as automotive interior designs often interact with carmakers’ valuable intellectual property — and represent value IP on their own — the supplier’s automotive partners began requiring layers of security that spreadsheets simply couldn’t handle. They desperately needed a better way to handle their data.

To that end, the supplier earnestly began its search for an automated solution to its tedious and error-prone manual data exchange processes on which the company’s designers together spent thousands of hours per year. The loss of productivity was equivalent to having multiple full-time employees on payroll doing nothing but collecting and sending data, the company.

Like other businesses in the industrial design space, the supplier uses computer aided design (CAD) software to create and store their automotive interior designs. The supplier needed a solution that could take their CAD files, which are notably complex in structure, and integrate them with their product lifecycle management (PLM) software.

Results

Designed expressly for the needs of large manufacturing organizations that rely on global supply chains, Rocket® TRUfusion™ Enterprise completely automated away the manual exchange of CAD and PLM data, “enabling our designers to focus on their core activities, which are making our clients’ ideas come to life,” says the company’s chief operations officer. “With Rocket TRUfusion Enterprise, we’re not only responding faster to quotes, change requests, and other iterative steps throughout the product lifecycle, but we’re also delivering a truly collaborative design experience for our customers.”

Implementation was simple and quick with TRUfusion Enterprise’s out-of-the-box support for popular PLM systems such as Siemens Teamcenter, as well its ability to translate CAD data into different formats as required by a business’s unique needs. “It handled everything with ease,” the chief operations officer says. “We’ve been able to pass around files between employees and customers without losing any data integrity.”

But it’s not just efficiency that they’ve gained with TRUfusion Enterprise, the company reports. The company’s automotive partners can now rest easy knowing TRUfusion Enterprise monitors and logs every file processing and exchange step automatically, generating a complete audit trail. “It’s a single record of truth,” the chief operations officer says.