Baldwin Filters: PDM Implementation Saves $175,000 Per Year

 

By Jeff Rogers
Project Leader
Baldwin Filters
Kearney, Nebraska
 

 

Implementation of a product data management (PDM) system at Baldwin Filters saved $175,000 per year by streamlining engineering change orders (ECOs) and new product requests (NPRs). In the past, processing an average of 12 engineering change orders and three new products per day had the firm’s engineers bogged down in paperwork. Looking to improve the situation, the company contacted Avatech Solutions, Omaha, Nebraska, a design automation integrator with considerable experience in PDM solutions. The integrator analyzed Baldwin’s situation, recommended a PDM program called Matrix Global Advantage from MatrixOne, Inc., Chelmsford, Massachusetts, and provided training and custom programming assistance. The new system automated the approval process and other paperwork associated with ECOs and NPRs, reducing turnaround time by 50% and 10% respectively.
 
Baldwin Filter’s business is protecting engines and engine-powered systems against dirt. Known as "the heavy-duty people," Baldwin Filter makes air, oil, fuel, hydraulic, coolant, and transmission filters for a wide variety of applications including agriculture, automotive, construction and mining, industrial, marine, and trucking. The company has 1200 employees and sales of $200 million. With facilities in the United States, Mexico, China, England, and South Africa, the company designs and manufactures more than 4100 different kinds of air, coolant, diesel/gas fuel, hydraulic, lube, and transmission filters. Two basic strengths have helped the company grow to become one of the world’s top producers of heavy duty and automotive filtration products over the past 60 years. First of all, Baldwin builds the widest range of heavy-duty filters in the industry. Second, Baldwin consistently manufactures at levels that meet or exceed the filter quality, performance, and supply requirements of customers.
 
Continuous Improvement
 
Baldwin’s strategy is to design filtration products from scratch rather than assembling components made by other companies. This gives Baldwin engineers constant opportunities to improve the design and manufacturing process and to deliver the world’s best filtration products. With its 20-person engineering staff and 10-person support team, Baldwin introduces an average of 700 new filters per year, including 300 filters marketed under the Baldwin name and 400 filters sold under other labels. Baldwin also puts a major emphasis on reducing costs through product and process improvements.  These improvements, in fact, have generated an average of $1.5 million in cost savings per year over the past five years. In recent years, savings have increased to $3 million.
 
In the past, implementing all of these new products and ECOs involved an enormous amount of paperwork. In particular, the approval process added weeks and sometimes months to the time needed to launch a new product or introduce changes or improvements. Before ECOs are implemented, they are reviewed by multiple departments including engineering, manufacturing, sales, and, in some cases, purchasing. The engineer initiating the change would put together a documentation package along with a routing slip directing it to the proper people. The approval process often stalled from the very beginning. The documents might be delivered to a manager who already had dozens of ECOs in his or her in-box—not to mention a wide range of other documents requiring his or her attention. The ECOs were usually the easiest thing to put off because the engineers creating them were too busy making other improvements to follow up. Sometimes documents would disappear for months under a stack of papers.
 
Previous Delays
 
The result was that the simplest ECOs took an average of five weeks to process while the more complicated ones took an average of ten weeks. New products faced similar delays and took an average of ten to twelve months to reach the market. These delays reduced revenues and meant that a considerable portion of engineers’ time had to be spent shuffling papers rather than meeting customer needs. Baldwin managers were interested automating this process through the use of a PDM system but were concerned about horror stories they had heard about systems requiring hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of customization before users could perform even the simplest of tasks. They hired Avatech initially to analyze the company’s current engineering processes and develop a formalized set of specifications for a PDM system.
 
Avatech consultants, led by Mike Petersen and Dave Cleasby, interviewed more than 30 engineers, managers, and people from other disciplines to evaluate how the engineering process was functioning at Baldwin Filter. In particular, they looked in detail at the ECO and NPR processes and documented exactly how they worked both in theory and in practice. The Avatech team considered the needs and wants expressed by managers and developed a series of specifications for a PDM system capable of automating the company’s current approval process but requiring a minimum of customization. During this process, Avatech consultants considered additional factors required to support a PDM implementation including hardware, operating system, and networking issues as well as those associated integration with Baldwin’s computer-aided design systems.
 
Software Selection
 
Avatech considered most of the leading PDM systems on the market as well as a number of general purpose document management programs. They recommended the Matrix Global Advantage because of its capabilities for automating Baldwin’s existing processes with a minimum of customization and training. Avatech also recommended upgrading the company’s hardware and, in the process, creating a solid, PC network with all network resources protected from environmental risks. Although Baldwin managers had previously been leaning towards another system, they were so impressed by the thoroughness of the study and thought represented by Avatech’s recommendations that the decision team elected to purchase Matrix and other items according to Avatech’s findings.
 
The hardware chosen includes a Hewlett-Packard Netserver LX Professional with duel 200 MHz Pentium II processors, three 9.1 gigabyte hard drives arranged in a RAID configuration and a 40 gigabyte tape drive. With the components in place, Avatech consultants installed the software, and provided initial training, helped Baldwin engineers scope out the implementation process, and provided assistance during the early stages of this process. After a remarkably short period of time, Baldwin users developed an understanding of the software and were able to complete the implementation process on their own. In addition, using software that did not require special programming skills not only reduced the implementation time and cost, but also improved the final result by allowing the people who know the process best to define it. Other aspects of the system appreciated by Baldwin users include is the graphical nature of the program and the ability to make changes in real time.
 
Programming Assistance
 
Baldwin continued to utilize the services of Avatech for tasks requiring special skill sets. Although the majority of the implementation was performed graphically, several areas required programming in the TCL language. Avatech wrote scripts to perform several functions, of which one of the most important was one automatically selecting the proper people to whom the ECO is sent for approval. For example, the script automatically selects the manager of the plant in which the filter for which the change applies will be manufactured from a group consisting of all of Baldwin’s plant managers.
 
With implementation complete, reviewers can now simply call up Matrix to find out which documents are awaiting their approval. Originators can easily see the status of documents they created, the status of the approval process, and the amount of time taken for each approval. The transparent nature of the process encourages reviewers to respond more quickly. The fact that documents are transmitted electronically rather than through inter-company mail also saves a considerable amount of time. As a result, Matrix Global Advantage reduced the time required to process ECOs by at least 50%. The result is a reduction in the average ECO implementation by one month, generated savings of $125,000 per year by implementing manufacturing cost reductions more quickly than were achieved in the past. An indeterminate amount of additional savings came from the reduction in the amount of engineers’ time spent on paperwork.
 
Automating NPRs
 
Based on this success, Baldwin engineers next focused on automating the NPR process. The NRP process consists of five steps including request, design, approval, implementation, and release. The automation of the NPR process has just been completed and management estimates that it will reduce the product development cycle by one month—generating $50,000 per year in additional revenue. Despite the fact that it is faster, the new NPR cycle actually involves input from many more people who were not consulted in the old process. This additional input is expected to lead to higher quality new product decisions, resulting in an additional amount of revenues.
 
As you might expect, management considers the PDM implementation at Baldwin Filter to be a major success. By streamlining the ECO and NPR process, the company has generated additional revenues, implemented cost savings sooner, and permitted engineers to spend more time on their primary tasks. The key to success was an up-front analysis that enabled the company select the right PDM system, thus paving the way to a successful implementation.