Software cuts lead time at tanker manufacturer

Liquid waste tanker manufacturer Whale anticipates that its investment in DriveWorks, a new design automation and productivity application, will help in reductions in delivery lead times

Whale Tankers, the largest manufacturer of liquid waste tankers and jetting equipment in Europe has chosen DriveWorks Design Automation software from KB4 in its productivity initiative.

A market leader in its field, Whale exports to over 60 countries world-wide and supplies most local authorities, independent waste contractors and water companies in the UK.

The company's stated aim is to continually improve the quality and value of its products, through design innovation, to maximise durability, reliability, easy of maintenance, fitness for purpose and residual value Whale Tankers is working to guarantee shorter delivery lead times - in many cases reduced by 50 per cent and more - on all new vehicles.

These much improved delivery lead times are to be achieved as a result of an on-going investment and modernisation programme initiated three years ago at the Whale factory site in Ravenshaw, Solihull.

Over this period Whale has spent in excess of £2 million on driving productivity by introducing better working practices and creating bigger and better manufacturing facilities.

The latter includes investments in 3D CAD (SolidWorks), a state of the art paint shop using the most advanced spray systems in Europe, new better equipped workshops, additional service bays and highly sophisticated computer systems.

In addition all current employees as well as new recruits have undergone and will continue to receive specialist training in their field.

Whale MD, Rod Turner said, "Two years ago, regrettably, as our order book grew so too it seemed did our delivery lead times.

It was a huge problem for us and there was no instant solution, it required time to introduce major changes across every aspect of our business.

We have not yet achieved all our goals but thanks to the concerted efforts of everyone at Whale over the last couple of years we have made significant progress in our aim to streamline the business by modernising the factory and adopting more efficient working practices.

The reductions in delivery lead times on new vehicles are evidence of this.

This year we hope to do better still." Whale also anticipates that its investment in DriveWorks, a new design automation and productivity application will help the company even further.

Commenting on Driveworks, John Dorney, Technical Manager said "We are now achieving dramatic productivity improvements as a result of the work we are able to do using Driveworks." The concept underpinning DriveWorks is that of capturing the design and engineering knowledge and experience, or 'rules' inherent within the product design.

Once captured DriveWorks marries 'intelligence' with un-attended processing power to perform repetitive design engineering tasks.

The output is all the information required to manufacture and market product variants.

There are two important time-saving elements to DriveWorks, the first being the ability to rapidly create variations of existing products and assemblies, either with an as needed procedure, or by mass, unattended creation.

KB4, who have developed the product, describe the effect of DriveWorks as "like cloning your best engineer".

Since DriveWorks frees up that engineering resource to concentrate on other more technical tasks by automating the routine, Whale are already finding out just what means.

The second time-saving element is in the software's ability to create a brand new product or assembly, based on rules, and then to add existing (or new cloned) sub-assemblies or parts to the main assembly.

DriveWorks is surprisingly easy to implement, with current users and administrators at Whale finding that the more the system is used, the greater its power.

This is because the system 'intelligently' manages the design rules and relationships and how they behave within the design mechanism.

KB4 claim that DriveWorks also has a self-populating database feature which, again saves valuable time as the solution develops as you use it, making the whole design process more productive.

Described as a "Clone and Drive" feature, experienced design engineers can either design from scratch or allow non-technical members of the company such as those involved in providing tenders and quotations, to develop variants of the company's existing product range.

This is because DriveWorks allows engineering knowledge to be shared, distributed and managed.

Repetitive tasks can be devolved to non-technical staff or to the computer to process.

This frees the engineers to get on with other more interesting and demanding tasks for which they were originally trained.

DriveWorks integrates with existing applications rather than replacing them.

Interfaces included with the standard product include calculation spreadsheets and Bills of Materials.

DriveWorks uses familiar tools like Microsoft Excel, already widely used at Whale whilst the provided data capture module makes sure that capturing design variables and rules is as easy as using SolidWorks.

This ease of use and integration means that even the novice user can get to grips with the system very quickly.

Implementation time at Whale has been less than two weeks.

When you consider that the closest applications to DriveWorks are traditional MRP driven configurators, that can take months if not years to implement, then the gains are significant.

What's more the programme adapts to the users products and culture rather than forcing a methodology change.

Whale are now looking forward to more than exceeding their customers expectations.

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