For many manufacturers, digital transformation doesn’t happen all at once.
It happens one business problem at a time.
An engineering team needs better control over design data. Manufacturing wants approved product information delivered faster. Sales needs a better way to configure increasingly complex products. Leadership wants confidence that every department is working from the same information.
That was the challenge facing one North American manufacturer.
Rather than implementing disconnected software projects, the company established a long-term roadmap to create a connected digital foundation spanning engineering, manufacturing, ERP, and customer-facing processes. Each phase built upon the last, creating a scalable platform designed to support future growth without disrupting day-to-day operations.
The challenges
The company designs and manufactures a broad range of configurable conveyor systems, controls, and material handling solutions, sold both directly and through a network of dealers and resellers. The company’s products had become increasingly configurable, while the systems supporting engineering, manufacturing, and sales had evolved independently over many years.
Prior to this work, the company was already using Autodesk Vault Professional as its product data management (PDM) system of record, with part numbers assigned in Vault serving as the master part numbers used downstream in Epicor, its ERP system. But several gaps sat between these systems:
The objective became clear. It wasn’t enough to simply to deploy new software. It was time to build a connected digital thread across the business.
Phase 1:
Creating a trusted engineering foundation
The company’s transformation began by establishing governance around engineering data.
Instead of treating engineering files as isolated documents, they became governed business assets in workflows spanning the full product lifecycle and reaching into their Epicor ERP.
Change management
A big win up front. The company prioritized change order workflows with defined approval processes, scripted calculations and automation, email notifications, and pre- and post-release lifecycle states.
Items and BOM
The team stood up the structures needed to capture and store bills of material, pricing and lead-time data, and the formulas behind them, with PLM (Fusion Manage) items configured to support the new (Fusion Manage to Vault) PDM connector.
Parts and assemblies
Revision and lifecycle setup extended down to individual parts, which also meant settling a foundational question — whether Vault or Fusion Manage would serve as the ultimate source of truth for part numbering.
PDM connector
An on-premise agent synchronizes items, BOMs, and neutral-format file attachments (STP, DXF, PDF) from Autodesk Vault into Fusion Manage in one direction, triggered either automatically when an item’s state changes in Vault or manually by a user.
MBOM editor
A separate web application, built on Autodesk Platform Services, gives users a purpose-built interface for transforming engineering BOMs into manufacturing BOMs before they’re published to ERP. Standing this up meant provisioning a dedicated MBOM web server, configuring APS for secure token-based communication, and configuring the Fusion Manage tenant to store and validate the data the tool produces.
Roles and governance
Roles, groups, and permissions were configured alongside internal and external notifications and milestone/task tracking, giving the company a governed, auditable way to move a design through its lifecycle.
Phase 2:
Standing up configure, price, quote
It was time to replace the company’s aging configuration solution.
The no-longer-supported Autodesk ETO configurator was replaced with Tacton CPQ, standing up the new environment from the ground up while respecting the customer’s two decades of experience building configuration logic in-house. KETIV built the initial foundation and trained the company’s own developers to extend it further, and today, the bulk of the company’s product catalog runs in Tacton.
Pilot one line…and go!
KETIV built out one product line in full, establishing the structure, constraints, and UI layout as a reference implementation, with the customer’s own team then taking the lead on extending the approach across the rest of the catalog.
Integrated product catalog
Alongside the configurable products sits a non-configurable catalog of standard parts, integrated so that attributes, pricing, and documentation are pulled directly and automatically from ERP.
Proposals and visualization
An automated proposal generation step produces documents templated to match the company’s existing quote format, while a live 3D visualization uses lightweight models derived from the company’s Autodesk Inventor CAD files to allow users to see their configuration update in real time.
Dynamic pricing
Pricing logic combines price-list-based pricing, feature- and option-based pricing, and cost-plus-markup calculations, with support for customer-specific and ad hoc discounting.
CAD automation
Tacton is connected to Autodesk Inventor so a configured product can generate its own CAD model automatically, rather than requiring manual drafting. A custom AutoCAD plug-in built on top of that connection lets users create new conveyor elements, copy and modify existing ones, and keep a drawing in sync with its Tacton configuration as either side changes. For most configurations today, this pipeline generates the full CAD model and BOM straight through Inventor, direct to the shop floor.
Self-service portal
A customer self-service web portal gives distributors and customers the ability to sign up, log in, configure products, visualize them (including in augmented reality), and submit orders through a shopping-cart-style flow. That self-service model has since scaled significantly: more than 100 distributors, along with some of the company’s largest enterprise customers, now configure their own solutions directly using AutoCAD and Tacton.
Phase 3:
Connecting engineering and ERP
Finally, it was time to address the flow of data into Epicor ERP.
The most recent phase of the engagement connected Vault directly to Epicor Kinetic Cloud using KETIV’s DataBridge integration platform, built around a Vault connector and an Epicor connector that operates through Epicor’s REST APIs.
When a design is approved and released on a change order in Vault, the integration automatically creates or updates the corresponding part and BOM records in Epicor, carrying roughly 10 to 15 attributes along with a link back to the original Vault record — viewable directly through Vault’s thin client from within Epicor.
Looking ahead
Across the entire project there is a consisent throughline of customer transformation which stresses their team’s ongoing ownership.
KETIV builds the initial architecture and handles the most technically demanding setup work, then trains the customer’s team to own, maintain, and extend the systems themselves.
The result is a connected foundation spanning engineering data, lifecycle and change management, configuration and quoting, and ERP that the company can keep building on, whether that means additional product lines, deeper distributor self-service, or future integrations with quality and new-product-introduction processes.
“What made this engagement different wasn’t just the systems we implemented…it was the intent behind them. Every phase of this project was built so the customer’s own team could pick it up and run with it. Our job was to build a strong foundation and make sure they didn’t need us standing over their shoulder to keep improving it.”
— Phil Steiger, Director of Professional Services, KETIV Technologies