Every manufacturing company is a complex gear that demands steadfast connection in order to run smoothly. Going from the design phase to the final product that will eventually hit the market is a long process, but it doesn’t have to be needlessly tortuous.
Connection is the key to a flawless process: connection among the people and the departments along the whole supply chain, and connection among the systems employed by every single team, that are often disconnected from one another. Reliably connecting teams and integrating different systems makes this complexity much easier, averting the risk of blind spots that may cause supply chain oversights, employee missteps and product errors.
So if connection is what you need, we can help you integrate Autodesk Vault with either your PLM or your ERP. Here’s how it works!
powerGate is the best-in-class connection software for Autodesk Vault customers, helping engineers and designers cut the time on creating, updating and transferring engineering BOM’s to the ERP System while improving the quality and accessibility of the documentation needed by other teams.
powerGate connects Vault to ERP in just a few weeks, offering complete flexibility in terms of customization.
The BOM transfer allows engineers and designers to carefully and correctly transfer their changes to the purchasing and production departments, as well as to be immediately updated on errors or restrictions and take action accordingly.
Comparing multi-level BOMs before transferring them to ERP provides transparency between Vault and ERP.
This solution dramatically reduces the BOM transfer time while simplifying it and improving accuracy.
Typically, design documentation contains items, part lists, and files that need to be published as PDFs, DXFs and STEP in order to share them with the purchasing and production departments.
powerGate provides the right tools to automate the creation and update of drawing files: each time the related Vault file is released, updates and metadata are sent to the ERP system, making sure that everyone is working with the latest file version.
During the design process in AutoCAD or Inventor, engineers or designers may need to create ERP items or add raw materials and purchase parts to the 3D model, in order to complete the BOM and transfer it to the ERP system. powerGate provides a convenient item creation and search dialog system which allows the user to create new items or find existing raw materials and purchase parts which can then be easily added to the Inventor model, and to the Inventor BOM. This way, the BOM grows with the design while working within Inventor.
With powerGate, custom validations can be added to vault workflows to check data compliance with the ERP system.
For example, if a designer is trying to release an assembly into Vault, powerGate checks that the consumed items all exist in the ERP system, are in the correct state, or perform other individual checks.
By anchoring Vault workflows to ERP data, engineering can ultimately release data that is compliant with the rest of the organization preventing downstream issues.
Automate the transfer of BOM data to the ERP system
Direct connectionwith ERP in weeks not months
Engineers and designers manage BOM from familiar CAD environment
Immediate execution and feedback
Reduce design time
Easy customization with low maintenance costs
Constant updates to comply with new Autodesk releases
powerPLM is the 100% Autodesk-focused solution deeply integrated with engineering tools such as Autodesk Inventor and Autodesk Vault, with direct connection to Autodesk Fusion 360 Manage.
The BOM gets published to Autodesk Fusion 360 Manage, thus becoming accessible to other teams. Either on release of an assembly or manually triggered, the Vault / CAD BOM will be published through a job directly to Autodesk Fusion 360 Manage. All the involved items will be created or updated in Autodesk Fusion 360 Manage and all secondary documents, like PDFs, will be published as well. This way, the whole design documentation will be accessible to all the involved teams.
Once the BOM is published to Autodesk Fusion 360 Manage, any team can collect change requests through Autodesk Fusion 360 Manage and start an improvement process. Whenever a change request has been approved, it turns into a change order in Vault for the engineering team. Once the change has been applied, the process goes back to Autodesk Fusion 360 Manage for further completion. As Vault and Autodesk Fusion 360 Manage are well integrated, the process is seamless and provides all teams with insight into the state and progress of any given change.
New ideas and projects begin way before engineers starts their work. If all the information is captured by Autodesk Fusion 360 Manage, as soon as an idea or a project kicks-off a new folder structure is automatically created in the Vault, so that the engineering department can start working on the new project straight away and with all the relevant data and the link to Autodesk Fusion 360 Manage available for further information.
With powerPLM, custom validations can be added to Vault workflows and checked for data compliance against the Autodesk Fusion 360 Manage system. For instance, if a designer is trying to release an assembly inside the Vault, powerPLM checks that the consumed items are not subject to an open Autodesk Fusion 360 Manage change process. By anchoring Vault workflows to PLM data, the engineering team can ultimately release data that is compliant with the rest of the organization and prevent downstream issues.
In addition to items and part lists, files are also a crucial element of the overall design documentation. Typically, this involves publishing PDFs, DXFs and STEP files to be shared with the purchasing and production departments. Yet doing this manually is time-consuming and error-prone.
powerPLM provides the right tools to automate the generation and updating of such files: each time the related Vault file is released, it is published by a dedicated machine that sends and updates the files and metadata to the Autodesk Fusion 360 Manage system, so that everyone is working with the latest and correct file version.
Improved collaboration and visibility across the entire
Easy customization with low maintenance costs
Streamlined design processes
Improved product quality
Constant updates to comply with new Autodesk releases