Based in Fountain, Minnesota, Valley Design has been a leader in table base manufacturing, designing, building, and supplying high-quality table base components directly to furniture manufacturers for over 35 years. Their desire to streamline engineering and production processes aligns with their core goal of sustainability, as they work to reduce waste, lower energy consumption, and improve their overall environmental impact.
Valley Design uses Autodesk Inventor for product design and Autodesk Vault Professional for data management. However, production teams struggled to locate engineering data efficiently, as item numbers didn’t always match drawing numbers. Production staff, especially fabrication coordinators, were frustrated with Autodesk Vault Thin Client, which required an 11-step process to find and print jobs.
“People on the production floor couldn’t find the drawings they were looking for because all we had were drawing numbers, and we do a lot of tabulated drawings,” explained Tim Simpson, Tooling/Process Engineer at Valley Design, “The item numbers didn’t match the drawing numbers, and with the updates to Vault Thin Client, there were even more steps involved, leading to frustration.”
What were the impacts? This inefficient process caused significant delays for production planners, who process an average of 300 jobs each day. The team needed a faster, more intuitive way to access drawings by item number and eliminate the unnecessary steps that were slowing down production.
Images courtesy of Valley Design
Valley Design has worked closely with KETIV over the years, collaborating on Autodesk Vault management, optimizations, and upgrades. This ongoing relationship, along with participation in KETIV Virtual Academy, helped drive awareness and reinforce their decision to move forward with the automation project.
Valley Design chose a tailored solution to automate the creation and storage of PDFs. The key components of the automation solution included:
Working closely with Valley Design, KETIV developed a script that automatically publishes PDFs based on item numbers, triggered by lifecycle state changes within Vault. The script validates drawing numbers and ensures the correct file is generated.
KETIV configured CoolOrange powerJobs software on Valley Design’s existing Vault Job Processor, enabling seamless integration with their current systems.
The solution centralized PDF files in a network folder, where they could be easily searched by item numbers. This approach drastically simplified the process for production staff, who no longer had to navigate through multiple steps or mismatched drawing and item numbers.
The automation solution delivered immediate improvements in efficiency, particularly for Valley Design’s production planners.
Duane Solberg, Manager, Engineering & Product Design at Valley Design, helped quantify the results for Valley Design, “The team went from an 11-step process that took 43 seconds to find and print job PDFs, to just 18 seconds and three-step process. Those small time savings add up. At over 300 jobs processed per day, production planners are now saving just over two hours of labor each day”.
Tim Simpson added, “The biggest impact was reducing frustration for those production planners. Now they can search by item number and find the documents they need.”
Valley Design is planning to upgrade to the latest version of Autodesk Vault Professional later this year. With KETIV’s help, they expect a smooth migration process, having already worked with KETIV to optimize their Vault setup in the past. This upcoming upgrade will ensure that their systems continue to run efficiently, and Valley Design looks forward to continued improvements in their production processes.
Images courtesy of Valley Design