The pressure on companies to standardize is constantly growing. Greater product complexity leads to higher development costs
Structuring and reusing product data and knowledge saves time and money
Starting point & challenge
To encourage the reuse of parts over the years at MTD Products, a number of different methods have existed
- The first version was a physical folder. This was followed by an Excel spreadsheet, basically the same data list in an electronic version. Maintaining and updating both versions was extremely laborious and time-consuming
- With the introduction of Teamcenter, there were new possibilities for searching. However, simple searches already returned over 1,000 objects without details of the individual parts
- The challenge for MTD Products is to build better products with fewer parts to reduce warranty and production costs
Decision for BCT aClass
MTD Products decided to implement BCT aClass. Essential for their decision were the following factors:
- User-friendly user interface
- Integration in Teamcenter and NX: BCT aClass is started directly from the CAD environment. The active parts can be easily classified and the NX properties synchronised with classification attributes
- Geolus 3D geometric search: Comparable to Google Image Search. This product has indexed all JT files stored in Teamcenter and generates a kind of fingerprint with which similar or identical parts can be found. This search outputs both classified and unclassified parts
- The class documentation in BCT aClass has a tab on which design documents can be placed
