VEMAG

Spare parts catalogs with 3dvia for optimal service

VEMAG Maschinenbau GmbH has been developing and producing machinery and equipment for food industry and trade for over 60 years. During this period, the company has built an outstanding reputation among food producers at home and abroad. To live up to this reputation in its services as well, these have now been enhanced with the introduction of CATALOGcreator®.

VEMAG Maschinenbau GmbH - The Company

The original focus of VEMAG on the traditional trade was quickly expanded to include industrial applications, in order to keep up with the increasing concentration in the area of food production and the steadily growing farm sizes. In recent years the systematic nature of the specific solutions was stressed increasingly in VEMAG, i.e. the integration of complex processing steps in the filling or portioning process.

The goal is a modular system of standard fillers and customized attachments that can be flexibly tailored to meet the specific needs of the user. VEMAG employs a staff of 358 in Verden. The company is active worldwide and achieves an export rate of over 80%.

Initial situation

The spare parts catalogs were produced with great effort with Adobe InDesign in four languages and were difficult to keep up to date. The BOMs had to be created manually, because the foreign languages were maintained in SAP only sporadically. The graphics were provided by an external service, and were linked by hand with the BOM. This approach was very expensive and error-prone.

In total VEMAG publishes catalogs for about 50 serial machines and attachments. These have to be maintained and versioned during their life cycle. Another 100 special-purpose machines and attachments are added per year, which will be documented „as built“. A catalog includes about 100 units and approx. 2,000 spare parts.

Requirements

The ever-growing portfolio and the great pressure of time make a permanent manual catalog creation in VEMAG impossible. The output data and the production processes of the spare parts catalogs had to be optimized urgently in order to implement an automated publication. Customers and service technicians expect current and accurate catalogs that are easy and intuitive to use. In addition to print and offline media publications in intranets and on the internet are required increasingly.

Solution

The foreign languages are now fully maintained in SAP. The export of the total BOM from SAP is in txt format, it can be edited as needed in CATALOGcreator^®. The 3D models of the structure are stored in 3dvia format in the PLM system Agile. From here employees of the Technical Documentation Department produce the 3dvia Composer 2D illustrations.

The linking of BOMs and illustrations for publication in print, CD and intranet is fully automated. The printed catalogs only serve as a backup and will only be sent to customers on paper after an explicit request.

Conclusion

At VEMAG’s the technical documentation, construction, spare parts and entire after sales areas mainly benefit from the introduction of CATALOGcreator®.

Particularly positive are:

• The production time of new catalogs has been reduced significantly
• The maintenance requirements of existing catalogs is much lower
• Improvement of the master data
• The timeliness and quality of the catalogs has increased significantly

Prospect

The next step will be to make available the published catalogs on the intranet on the Internet as well. This is possible with little effort, as an unlimited user management with web login is already included in the standard delivery of CATALOGcreator^®. The circuit diagrams of the electric – CAD system e³ are to be integrated into the catalogs. The test phase is almost complete. Again, there is a standard solution of CATALOGcreator^®, which has been proven in many projects already.

„Our expectations for the introduction of CATALOGcreator® were fully met. We have set up a complete new workflow for the creation of electronic parts catalogs, which has reduced our cost considerably. The collaboration with the project managers Hermann Arya at TID Informatik and Sebastian Forst at CCS SOLUTIONS was very pleasant. Issues raised were all dissolved in a timely manner.“

Dr. Michael Gerretz, Head of Documentation, VEMAG Maschinenbau GmbH