The Geometric Similarity Search as an effective tool for parts management at IMAFORNI INT‘L S.p.A.
Case Study: The Strategic Parts Management PARTsolutions at Imaforni
Founded in 1962 in Verona, IMAFORNI INT’L S.p.A. is today an international world leader in the production of industrial ovens. The company is active in 83 countries with more than 1,000 biscuit and cracker oven lines installed worldwide.
Before starting the co-operation with CADENAS, no specific system was used at Imaforni to handle the nearly 120,000 standard and supplier parts used in the production of the industrial ovens. In 2012 the company decided to start a project of geometric search with two main targets: to avoid the proliferation of multiple parts and to optimize the reuse rate of parts in the PLM system.
One solution for all company departments
The Strategic Parts Management PARTsolutions by CADENAS met this requirement and it is now installed on approx. 50 work stations at Imaforni. “The search functions offered by CADENAS’ software solutions are used in the technical, production and purchasing departments for 3D geometrical searching during the engineering phase and the geometrical comparison between similar parts or different releases of the same part number”, says Venturelli. This is required to avoid the introduction of similar or duplicate part copies and improves the reuse of parts already released within the company.
The integration of the Strategic Parts Management PARTsolutions by CADENAS, with the existing PLM system used at Imaforni, was possible thanks to the implementation of processes which import parts during the night that have been released to the PLM system during the day. A check of all the parts verifies the presence of any duplicate copies within the imported components. This allows engineers to be offered alternatives for their possible use and also to avoid the creation of parts already existing in the database.
The benefits
One of the greatest benefits resulting from the installation of the Strategic Parts Management PARTsolutions at Imaforni is that “it is possible to optimize the management of the components already existing in the company system. Furthermore, the internal production and purchasing processes have been improved thanks to the Geometric Similarity Search, which has simplified the check procedure to verify the geometric differences between various versions of the parts”, says Venturelli.
With reference to the possible parts reduction resulting from the implementation of the Parts Management system PARTsolutions within the company, Venturelli explains that “it is difficult to verify this currently because the typology of products have a high rate of personalization. Certainly during these months we have reused a lot of existing parts, avoiding the creation of new codes to handle.”
An effective co-operation also for the future
In the near future, the co-operation between Imaforni and CADENAS will continue with the integration of the software solution PARTsolutions with the PLM system, to allow the management of the internal commercial codes and to support the activity of the Standardization department at Imaforni
More information about the case study of Imaforni and CADENAS under:
www.cadenas.de/partsolutions/customers/success-stories