In the machinery manufacturing industry, confusion in drawings and BOM management is a problem faced by many companies.
Today, we will share a real case to see how a typical medium-sized machinery manufacturing company solved these problems through the three-product PDM system to achieve R&D collaboration and efficiency improvement.
This machinery manufacturing company mainly produces non-standard automation equipment, conveyor lines and special machine tools, with an annual output value of approximately 180 million and a staff size of 220, including 35 in the R&D team.
Before the introduction of the Sanpin PDM system, their R&D management could be summarized in three words: “chaotic, slow, and wrong.”
The first is the confusion of drawing versions, which occurs at least 2 times a month –
There were three “wrong drawing” incidents. Version management relied entirely on artificial memory and sense of responsibility. In the first quarter of 2025, the use of the wrong drawing version resulted in two reworks, resulting in a direct loss of approximately 150,000 yuan.
Secondly, the BOM is out of touch with the drawings. Production often complains that “things don’t match up.” Non-standard equipment changes frequently. The design changes the drawings, but the BOM, process cards, and purchase lists may miss updates.
Finally, the design reuse rate is low. 30% – 40% of engineers’ work is repeated design, because the drawings are stacked in the shared folder without classification, attributes, and search.
In the selection stage, the company compared three PDM suppliers.
A well-known foreign PLM has powerful functions, but it is expensive, has a long implementation cycle, and supports non-standard customization business and requires a lot of secondary development; a domestic general-purpose PDM is moderately priced, but its functions are standard, and it does not support the in-depth needs of the machinery manufacturing industry; while the third-grade PDM is reasonably priced, has a short implementation cycle, is specifically optimized for the machinery manufacturing industry, and has built-in best practice templates for the machinery industry.
In the end, the company chose the Sanpin PDM system based on factors such as industry matching, implementation team experience, cost-effectiveness, and scalability.
The implementation process is divided into four stages and lasts for 150 days.
The first stage is demand research and solution design. The Sanpin Software implementation team stayed in the factory for two weeks to conduct in-depth research, identify and rank 37 key pain points, and output a PDM implementation plan.
The second stage is system configuration and data migration, setting up a server environment, configuring user role permissions, product classification libraries and workflows, and performing data migration at the same time. This stage is the most difficult, requiring the migration of a large number of drawing files, BOM records and design change orders. A large number of data problems were also discovered during the migration process. The Sanpin team assisted in formulating data cleaning rules and cleaning them while migrating.
The third stage is pilot operation and functional verification. Two typical projects were selected as pilots, and all design, review, change, and release processes were carried out in PDM. At the end of the pilot, significant results were achieved, such as shortening the drawing review cycle, improving BOM accuracy, and significantly shortening change traceability time.
The fourth stage is comprehensive promotion and deepening of application. After the pilot is successful, all employees will be trained, all new projects will be forced to enter PDM, old projects will be gradually migrated, and at the same time, deepening of application will begin, such as CAD integration, automatic BOM generation, change impact analysis, etc.
Comprehensive review data six months after implementation showed that all indicators have improved significantly.
The drawing search time is shortened from an average of 15-30 minutes to precise positioning within 3 seconds, and the efficiency is increased by 300 times; the BOM accuracy rate is increased from about 85% to more than 99.5%, and the error rate is reduced by 97%; the design change traceability time is shortened from 2-4 hours to less than 3 minutes, and the efficiency is increased by 40-
80 times; the design reuse rate increased from an estimated less than 20% to an actual 45%, an increase of 2.25 times; the drawing review cycle was shortened from an average of 3 days to less than 1 day, a 67% shortening; the number of rework due to drawing errors was reduced from 2-3 times per month to 0 times (for 6 consecutive months), 100% eliminated; the non-standard equipment design cycle was shortened from an average of 18 working days to 12 working days, a shortening of 33%.
These improvements have brought tangible benefits, including direct cost savings, efficiency improvements and quality improvements.
Finally, the company also gave three points of experience and suggestions.
The first is to sort out the process first, then select the system, and select and configure the system based on the optimized process; the second is to conduct data migration “step by step” to reduce the difficulty and risk of migration; the third is to cultivate internal “key users” and form a continuous improvement mechanism.
The core of R&D management in machinery manufacturing enterprises is the need for systematic management methods.
Sanpin PDM provides not only a set of software, but also a set of management practices that have been verified by a large number of machinery manufacturing companies.
If your business is facing similar problems, you may want to consider introducing a systematic solution.
