ME Elecmetal is Establishing a Single Source of Truth with Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)

The Technical Manager of Design at ME Elecmetal, Michael Best, was aware of an approach that would work. Michael is a veteran automation design engineer who brings an extensive knowledge of Autodesk and the ecosystem. He has 27-year history using AutoCAD (since version 12), Inventor (since R1), and has acted as a bug hunter and beta tester for Inventor in the past, and can even be found instructing at Autodesk University.

Michael and the ME Elecmetal team reached out to KETIV to obtain Fusion 360 Manage, realizing that the product and the partnership with KETIV would result in a flexible PLM solution that can adapt to the business. Michael had the confidence that they could start today, building their proof of concept and pushing on to Phase I of their grand vision. This was the best answer to connect their people, processes, and data across their distributed teams and geographies.

ME Elecmetal has a long history of partnering with KETIV, so kicking off the project was easy. The teams are in the process of integrating the existing instance of Autodesk Vault and Fusion 360 Manage, and are working to build out custom workspaces for Engineering Change Orders (ECOs) and proposals. They are establishing workspace fields to manage ECO direction for each project, supported by an associated workflow that allows for full tracking of each project or ECO in the system.

This allows better visibility and management across several product lines, like Mill Liners and Crushers. There are also dedicated spaces for R&D, Product Development, Quality, Field Reporting for Wear Tracking, and more, to allow them to get a handle across multiple teams and functions as part of the engineering lifecycle.

KETIV is providing training and guidance to manage proper adoption of the solution, and ME Elecmetal’s entire tenant for continued success.

What are the wins for ME Elecmetal as they deploy this secure, cloud-based solution? Most important to Michael and the team, it will remove obstacles. Fusion 360 Manage will allow the team to enhance their engineering abilities, identifying and automating operations to keep project creation on the road to completion.

Account Managers can place orders onsite with a customer, or in a car on their phone’s hotspot. Connecting to their information will be as easy as connecting their laptop to Wi-Fi. They do not need to return to the office anymore to enter information into the system.

ME Elecmetal is better able to keep up with changes. If unexpected changes arise in production or product designs, Fusion 360 Manage swiftly documents and alerts users so they can always stay in the loop. Michael is proud of the opportunities offered by the software to better track projects. “We can help our customers get to market a lot faster while at the same time optimizing our engineering processes and deliverables.”

Lastly, the organization is excited about enhancing production operations, such as planning, casting, sampling, inspecting, and generating improved parts for products. This is easy thanks to how Fusion 360 Manage deals with varied workspaces.

This is a great start to ME Elecmetal’s digital engineering and manufacturing transformation journey and establishment of a single source of truth – the first step in a major overhaul of their processes and systems. They are looking forward to leveraging Fusion 360 Manage and their relationship with KETIV to handle their critical engineering and transformation roadmap.

Michael and the team have established a multi-phased plan where they will integrate Fusion 360 Manage with their core customer and business systems; Salesforce and SAP. This will allow cross-directional communication between the customers, salespeople, engineers, and production floor.

In future phases they will also be:

• Bringing in real-time accounting of projects and billable hours, and safe permissions-based access to budgets.
• Integrating business documents (Office docs, emails, etc.) into Fusion 360 Manage projects for a 360-degree view of project information.
• Adding a searchable database to find documents quickly, based on metadata.