So design automation is where we can take a look at what
engineers do on a day to day basis and hopefully shorten, and
improve the process and get to manufacture or get to market
much much quicker. Our tool of choice is DriveWorks.
We use this,
it's been strong on the market for over 20 years.
It's got a lot of a lot of back and UK based firm so it's quite
handy for us.
And it's you know it's a product that you can take from an
express product and all the way up to kind of an online
configurator. So the way it can help our customers improve on
performance improve on things like repeatability.
You know we are all humans we make mistakes.
So if we can set something up that's very repeatable and take
the mundane things off the table and that's you know that
improves efficiency down the way. You know we can transform a
business or how they work how they think about the design, how
do we interact, or their customers interact with them as
a business.
And you know, the whole idea is to kind of you know reduce time
to market. So when are you talking about design automation,
it's not like kind of like if you buy a product.
The customer buys it and then that's, that's him he gets on
his way.
It's more of kind of a collaboration between us and the
customer.
Automation generally never seems to end,
people want to take automation further and further add more
product and more product.
And so it's it's not a kind of a finite end point we get to, it's
more of a you know we'll work together and each stage we kind
of engage with each other and then I'll give them the next
steps of the way,
and until they hopefully achieve where they want to be,
and to give them the skill sets that that customer needs to then
kind of become self-sufficient.
So some of our customer's, their products are very
same-but-different.
We've got customers in a HVAC industry whereby you know you
might be able to tackle a hundred percent automation.
I always say well it isn't usually an 80/20 rule, whereby
generally most customers with theme based products can
automate 80% of the designs and they are always still left with
20% that needs an engineer
to take a look at, the 'customs' or the one-offs.
So, we you know we take a look at the large proportion and see
if we can take some of the mundane stuff off the table
using design automation. So you know anybody embarking on
automation there's a lot of information stored within the
four walls of any business and that could be in the form of
spreadsheets, files scattered on servers. Usually they have a
person that's been there for a lot of years and he's the kind
of the go to guy and he's like the kind of the fountain of
knowledge of the product.
So what we're trying to do is try to take all of that
information and centralize it into the back end of our system.
So then the knowledge is stored, within the four walls of the
business you know sort of referred to as KBE type
solution, knowledge base engineering so in other
knowledge stores within that within the system.
So any business moving forward knows that that knowledge is
always going to be retained. So part of the services that we
provide is obviously the consultation, and thats, from
ourselves is business key to can any business to be successful
with the product.
So we
can deliver that in many ways.
One key way is obviously for one of our professional service team
to come on site, side by side with the with the user and then
further their knowledge and guide them so they then have you
know a journey they can embark on and kind of move that product
project forward. Other ways we can deliver this is by what we
call C.I.P. - Continual Improvement Program - whereby
what we do is we provide, one hour web sessions so a customer
can buy a pack of 8 web sessions and then, they can then call us
up book those in and then they can they can have like an hour
with us every now and again to get them over hurdles and again
that works very well.
Drip feeding kind of knowledge, product knowledge, and getting
them over certain hurdles moving forward. So with regards to
training there's a multitude of training courses that we offer,
there is the professional kind of level, we offer a two day
basic course and then we follow that with one day advance
course. Typically in the past we used to deliver those three days
back to back.
Now we can split them out so the customer to take the first two
days and then we can come back and deliver the final day.
Once he's got the head around a little bit of the basics. So in
terms of results, and everybody, every customer is looking to say
'Well what am I going to get from my investment when when's
the return gonna start to happen?'
And that can happen pretty much instantly depending on what type
of automation that you are trying to achieve.
You know we can take a small sub-assemblies get that quickly
automated to save time, that timesaving then can be then
reinvested into the into the design automation process to
then further save time.
You know if you're looking to take you know what you do and
all of it to a website where people come in on a portal
they're not you know it does take a lot of time, a lot of
thinking about. We've got customers going from nothing to
you know to live on the web within 18 months and that kind
of that time period.
But again it all depends on the product, of the amount of
product and the variance within that product.
And obviously the time being allowed by the end user to kind
of get that project moved on an open run.