Long term cost savings with PARTsolutions at Starlinger

Since 2011 Starlinger & Co. GmbH has been relying on CADENAS’ Strategic Parts Management PARTsolutions. The software solution PARTsolutions is used to quickly and easily find CAD components in the company, manage them, but also reduce their amount and thus save costs in the long term. Moreover PARTsolutions is optimized to promote a closer cooperation between procurement and engineering. For this purpose the solution offers both departments access to all technical and economic parts information. This strategy pursued by CADENAS is called PURCHINEERING, which combines the words “purchase” and “engineering”.

Starlinger & Co. GmbH is the world market leader in the field of machinery and process technology for woven plastic sack production. The company, with its headquarters in Vienna and production in Lower Austria, has been operating on the global market for 45 years, has 550 employees and serves customers in 136 countries. The Starlinger product range covers all types of machinery for the production of modern woven polypropylene sacks. The company has a wide spectrum of production processes.

Before PARTsolutions was introduced, parts were determined with a solely text-based search in the ERP and PDM system. Through the organisational separation in different product areas, Starlinger needed a parts management system that allows logistical control at an early stage of the development process and thus makes the best use of economies of scale and learning curves.

Significant changes have been noticed since the introduction of PARTsolutions – Karl Rippel, managing director of CADENAS Austria explains:

“Starlinger is using the search possibilities of PARTsolutions extensively and consequently, especially the Geometric Similarity Search. GEOsearch shows the possible parts and assembly groups within seconds and offers the metadata from the ERP and PLM system which necessary for selection at a glance The engineer is thus spared the tedious search in different systems. Moreover, since the introduction of PARTsolutions at Starlinger, no more unnecessary parts are created. Also the reuse of parts has massively increased. The time needed for the geometric search is between three and ten seconds, depending on the search area. The acceptance of the solution in the design was decisive for the project success. This in turn was mainly due to high quality search result and very low search effort.”

On average, every engineer saves at least 15 minutes of working time daily due to better search possibilities and 3D catalogs. At an hourly rate of 50 Euros this results in labor cost savings of 112,000 Euros per year.

Related to the complete project, Horvath draws the following conclusion:

“Creating new design parts was reduced by more than ten percent since the introduction of PARTsolutions. Despite a significantly increased amount of engineers and development projects, the amount of newly created design parts was kept constant and even decreased somewhat. Our internal processes have significantly improved through PARTsolutions, especially in the field of article creation and parts search. Notably the considerably enhanced quality of master data, the increased reuse of standard parts, the decrease to a few selected suppliers and the better use of preferred rows needs to be emphasized.”

The complete case study can be downloaded here:
www.cadenas.de/partsolutions/customers/success-stories