23 October 2008

Bolzoni Auramo is a leader in forklift manufacture

Bolzoni Auramo Group is achieving multi-site collaboration between technical departments and improved time-to-market through its implementation of Teamcenter PLM, discovers Mark Webb.

Bolzoni Auramo Group manufactures forklift truck attachments, lifting tables and hand pallet trucks, and is the leading supplier of integral side shifts to the main OEMs in the industry.

CEO Roberto Scotti says one of the key issues in his company’s future growth is its ability to develop new products: “For us a new product is important because it allows us to have better technical features and to achieve a reduced cost.

“Innovation is very important for our companies,” continues Scotti. “Innovation for us is the fuel for growth. It is the possibility to innovate the product, to have a better product in the marketplace, both from the point of view of technical features and also at a cost to differentiate our company from our competitors.”

Scotti identifies product lifecycle management (PLM) tools as necessary to be efficient in product creation and, especially, to get a new product on the market within a very short time.

Bolzoni Auramo Group was formed as a result of Luigi and Livio Bolzoni having studied solutions for building material handling in 1945. It has grown steadily since, initially by investing in its export business and more recently through acquisition. It began with branches in France, Spain and England, together with a distributor network all over Europe and the rest of the world. In 1987 the Bolzonis’ company merged with another Italian business TEKO, which specialised in the manufacture of hand pallet trucks and lifting tables.

In 1989 the company founded a new manufacturing plant in Chicago, USA and in 2002 it acquired the well-known American brand Brudi, which is a pioneer in palletless handling. The Brudi push pull range is now manufactured in Chicago and exported worldwide. The Chicago plant also manufactures integral and hook-on side shifts and fork positioners, and assembles carton clamps, multiple pallet handlers and parallel clamps for the American market. In 2006 Bolzoni SpA acquired its German competitor Meyer, resulting in an overall market share in Europe of 40 per cent. Bolzoni SpA employs 250 people at its headquarters in Casoni di Podenzano, Piacenza, Italy.

“In the last few years, we have made many acquisitions around the world,” says Scotti. “We bought a company in the United States, one in Finland, and another in Germany. One of the big challenges we had to face was how to harmonise all these companies in one group.”

Our new strategy is not to make the same product in the three different locations, but to make just certain components at each location

Roberto Scotti, Bolzoni Auramo Group CEO Although all the companies are making one product, Scotti says that it is very difficult, coming as they do from different cultures, to get them to work together on the same project. Scotti realised that Bolzoni needed software tools that could help achieve this goal and quickly found PLM software to be the perfect solution: “It gave us the possibility to have not three or four different engineering departments but just one. Thanks to the PLM system, we had the possibility to be much more efficient than we have been in the past.”

Highly customised and specialised products, to meet customers’ specific requirements need processes and tools to support designing and configuring them. “We have a very wide product range but mainly, all the units are customised for our customer, and sometimes it happens that we have to design a unit that will be reproduced in only one piece for one customer. It means that it’s important for us to reuse all the information in a short time,” explains Pietro Foroni, technical manager at Bolzoni.

Teamcenter from Siemens PLM Software has allowed Bolzoni to grow without increasing the size of its technical staff. “The number of people working in our technical department has stayed basically the same over the past ten years, even though our business has grown and we’re selling more complex products. This is possible only because we are using Teamcenter,” Foroni says.

The requirement is to have a single source of information globally to allow the different design offices to collaborate and to integrate suppliers, for example in Asia. This enables parts to be searched and re-used or modified as required.

“The benefit of having one system is that all the people that are working in our technical department have all the information, says Foroni. “It means that they are using one system only for making all the analysis. All the modification, the drawings and information are linked in the system.” Multi-Site, a Siemens technology residing inside Teamcenter, enables companies to share and synchronise data between sites.

Foroni adds: “Starting from three different companies, now we have one group and sometimes it happens that the production site is in a different place from the engineering department that made the drawing of the unit that we have to produce. For that reason, it’s important to have all the information coming under one net and useful for all the company.”

This single source of product information also enables parts to be manufactured globally and individual plants to manufacture specific product types, enabling volumes to be increased and therefore further efficiencies to be achieved.

“Our new strategy is not to make the same product in the three different locations, but to make just certain components at each location so we can produce larger volume at each place,” explains Scotti. Scotti sees the main Teamcenter value in terms of how it helps the company compete. “PLM has helped us to be more efficient in a variety of areas,” he says. “The result is that we can go to market with a new product in a very short time. One of the things that I truly believe is that it’s very important nowadays to be fast.”

Linking Teamcenter to its ERP systems provides Bolzoni with the ability within its technical department to own and manage the product structure definition and then to pass this over to the ERP to schedule either the purchasing or production. This is important, says Foroni, because the technical department staff are the experts in defining the product. “In the past, we had to prepare the information, link to the component in the CAD system, and then switch to the ERP system and rebuild and complete the information. This meant we lost time, and sometimes lost information.”

Foroni continues: “We prepare the bill of material of the complete unit in our ERP system. But for the technical department, there was no possibility to have the bill of material in a technical department system. We were not the owner of the bill of material of the complete unit. Now, thanks to Teamcenter, we are the owner of the bill of material from the technical point of view and I think this is the key issue. Also the ability to involve people outside of design to understand the impact of an engineering change request (ECN) to ensure that a proposed change is suitable and will not impact something unknown to design. Understanding the change before starting to execute on the change is critical.”

“We implemented into Teamcenter a workflow that, starting from the ECN request, is managed by the technical department. The information coming from the technical department is linked to our production people for planning, but also for modification of the tools, and of the programme and so on. And at the end, this information will also be switched to the quality control and after sales people for evaluation.”

In Finland, Bolzoni is using Teamcenter Engineering because of the specific product which that department has to develop. In Germany and in Italy, Bolzoni chose Teamcenter Express for its ease of installation and ongoing management.

Andy Kennington, EMEA marketing director for digital lifecycle management at Siemens PLM Software, points out: “Teamcenter is a great choice for Bolzoni Auramo as it has allowed them to deploy Teamcenter Express, which has been designed to be both fast to implement and easy to support. It has preconfigured best practices aligned to the company’s everyday tasks and processes and of course it’s all based around Microsoft standards. If they need to extend their solutions with some specific functionality, for example in Finland, then they can very simply move to Teamcenter to provide this additional capability up to a full end-to-end PLM system, still all using Multi-Site to share data and collaborate.”

Siemens PLM has provided an upgrade path from I-deas (the previous CAD system) to NX to protect Bolzoni’s investment in CAD. In Italy Bolzoni’s design engineers use I-deas and are switching to NX 5. In Germany they are starting to use NX 5 already. In Finland they have used NX 4 for between two and four years and they are planning to migrate to NX 5. In researching PLM systems, Foroni was impressed that Siemens was investing in allowing Ideas users to upgrade to NX and that all the data from I-deas would be available. “For Bolzoni, this represented the chance to continue to improve and to implement the knowledge and the data that we have coming from the past,” he says.

Implementation in each of the three companies went very smoothly according to Scotti, and he praises all the people from Siemens who provided support: “They helped us in every aspect and in every detail of this implementation, and I have to say I’m happy about the experience.”

“Our strategy was to unify three different engineering departments, and it was a difficult task because it’s a different culture,” says Scotti. “The Teamcenter solution proved to be perfect for our needs. The introduction of this system has been very smooth inside the company, not only in Italy but also in Germany and in Finland, and now we can have three engineering departments that are working together, connected by the system that is proving to be very effective every day.”

Scotti sums up: “In order to be competitive as a company, I truly believe that it’s very important to have a partner that is reliable and able to help to improve your company and your products. What we did with Teamcenter was very important for us because Siemens intend to have the best technology in the field. The company has people that are able to give support in the implementation and able to improve the product. We want to go forward and so it’s important that if we buy a technology, we work with a company that is able to improve this technology and to keep it as state-of the-art. And this is one of the reasons that convinced us to work with Siemens PLM.”

This article first appeared in the Autumn 2008 edition of Prime magazine.

Add a comment