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Adept Engineering Document Management Helps Construction Equipment Manufacturer Guntert & Zimmerman Compete for Big Projects and Enter New Markets
Guntert & Zimmerman is a small company that competes and thrives in the highly competitive construction equipment market. What’s their secret? They have built a core business on solid principles. They care for their customers. They have carved out a niche that larger companies don’t or can’t own. And finally, they have leveraged technology that lets them bring products to market faster.
Guntert & Zimmerman (G&Z) of Ripon, California (www.guntert.com) offers a complete line of high performance, state of the art concrete highway, airport and canal construction equipment. To help them streamline, they’re using SolidWorks 3D modeling and Adept engineering document management software from Synergis Software.
A lean engineering department accomplishes big projects
“We don’t have a huge staff, yet we do big things,” states Jerry Dahlinger, Vice President of Engineering at G&Z. Take, for example, the company’s S850 QUADRA Base and Concrete Slipform Paver, which has placed miles of airport aprons, runways, taxiways, and highways around the world, including North America, France, Australia, and India. “The S850’s top level assemblies might have 7,000-10,000 parts and sub-assemblies. And we’re developing machines even larger than that.”
“We’re selling to the top highway and airport paving contractors in the world,” explains Dahlinger. “Our real niche is customization. Because we’re not the biggest supplier in the highway/airport paving market, we offer custom solutions to the customer’s problems. As a result, engineering has to react very quickly to requests for design or feature changes to our standard product line. We make-to-order much of our equipment.”
There are other factors that require G&Z to be agile. “Our markets have changed,” notes Dahlinger. “Historically, we built large highway paving machines but now the projects are getting smaller, and the paving width is smaller. There is a bigger market for a smaller machine so we spent the last couple of years developing a new smaller highway paving machine. We started from scratch. Virtually, every drawing and every model on it is new. We just introduced the new paver in the Pittsburgh, PA area and were featured on CBS news. That was a big accomplishment.”
G&Z stays competitive by managing data
Because their product models were complex with many parts to track, Dahlinger wanted to give engineering an automated solution to help them manage and control their data. Any manual system or methods could only prove troublesome.
“We were using Windows Explorer to archive and track our files with AutoCAD,” explains Dahlinger. “When we started using SolidWorks, we thought we could continue to use Windows Explorer, but our productivity went down and we were nearing a crisis. It turned out we couldn’t effectively use SolidWorks without a data management system that supported its interdependent file structure. To meet our deadlines, we had to be able to have multiple people working on the same assemblies or different sub-assemblies with the same top level assembly – without stepping on each other’s feet.”
Cost +value + support = Adept
While it was obvious that they needed a document management system, they still had to find the right solution. At first, Dahlinger considered a company-wide document management system, but couldn’t get support from the other departments. Instead, he focused on solving engineering’s document management challenges.
“Our top system requirements were the ability to manage AutoCAD and SolidWorks files and streamline our ECO process.” That narrowed down the choice to a handful of solutions, including Adept from Synergis Software.
Dahlinger ultimately selected Adept for more reasons than he had originally outlined. “Adept’s biggest competitive advantage was the people that stood behind the product,” explains Dahlinger. “It was the people, plus that the company’s 100% commitment to and focus on engineering document management.”
Synergis Software also offered a range of implementation plans, which ultimately helped G&Z stay within a tight budget. “The Adept pilot program was essential to selling this solution to the company’s owner,” describes Dahlinger. “I couldn’t get him to bite on the whole proposal, so I asked him if I could buy one or two seats for the pilot program. We did a pilot for a couple of months and were able to prove its success. Then we bought more seats and rolled out Adept to the entire Engineering Department and then to the Production, Purchasing and Sales Departments.”
Implementing Adept is easy and straightforward
Dahlinger and his team chose to implement Adept on their own, with helpdesk phone support from Synergis Software. “Doing this on our own was a pretty big deal,” recalls Dahlinger. “I thought that I’d have to be heavily involved, but I was able to delegate most of the implementation to one of our project engineers, Iovtcho Delev—and he ran with it. Iovtcho now does our Adept administration along with his previous duties. Implementation was a lot easier than I thought it would be.”
“There was a lot of automation available for bringing the data from our existing drawings,” adds Iovtcho. “With Adept, we were able to quickly find all of our duplicate files then delete and rename them. It took us about two weeks to get all our data cleaned up.”
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