Gould Shawmut Protects The Power With PDM

By Harold Guptill

Documentation Control Supervisor

Gould Shawmut

 

 

Gould Shawmut focuses on providing customers with a stream of new products that provide continually higher levels of circuit protection performance. We are a leading power fuse supplier in North America and have a growing presence in Europe and the Pacific Rim. As we pursue improved productivity, we seek more reliable and efficient circuit protection equipment to serve as our first line of defense against any costly downtime and product delays.

In order to best maximize our production and optimize our performance, we selected Matrix Global Advantage (Matrix v6), MatrixOne’s enterprise product development management (PDM) system, to streamline product development workflow. As our backbone solution, Matrix enables us to manage, control and distribute critical engineering documentation throughout the entire enterprise easily and cost effectively.

Our engineers don’t waste valuable time searching for information, defining relationships among files and answering questions from manufacturing and sales. As a result, people can move product down the development pipeline in a more timely fashion. Almost every department at Gould, from engineering and cost accounting, to marketing, quality assurance and manufacturing, uses Matrix.

Gould Shawmut has 120 users of Matrix running on the Microsoft Windows and NT platforms, with plans to expand. Matrix integrates well with other applications we use, such as CAD and MRP systems. With Matrix, we can also accommodate conditional (if/then) branches among the various states of a process and develop custom functions using the Business Wizards to reduce such development processes, as the report mechanism, from 11 steps to only two. Users can filter data to produce custom views on the screen, keep multiple files open and add descriptive data “tool tips” to objects in a business process. We have recently implemented bar code label printing using a Visual Basic integration. This information comes directly from the Matrix database and is printed using label software.

Gould is running Matrix at all four of our electrical fuse plants. Matrix’s flexible and easy-to-use modules are designed for systems and business administrators, as well as general users. We now use the software to efficiently automate many segments of our engineering change order process. Before implementing Matrix, the change would take several weeks to implement in all four of our production plants because of the amount of paper and copying involved. The implement segment of the cycle is accomplished in a matter of a few hours. At last measure our engineering change order cycle time went from 79 days to 39 days with the implementation of Matrix.

Matrix Global Advantage helps Gould Shawmut ensure documentation accuracy, and as a result, we can get a quality product out the door on time and within budget. All of our engineering and manufacturing operations across North America are in synch. After having implemented Matrix, we’ve not only solved our original business challenges, but users have discovered Matrix’s value and continually establish better methods for a variety of other processes.