Crompton Greaves Limited is a well known player in the consumer electronics industry. It designs, manufactures and markets high technology electrical products and services related to power generation, transmission and distribution. It has manufacturing facilities in India along with other countries including Belgium, Indonesia, Ireland and Canada.

The company recently deployed Teamcentre PLM solution from UGS in its transformer division, in a bid to expand and automate the whole process.

Customer demands drive the need

Serving customers at a short notice was the major pain point for the transformer division at Crompton Greaves. It also wanted to integrate all the departments, in order to improve the coordination between them.

As Sandeep Arora, head of Project and IT, Transformer Division, Crompton Greaves, points out, “Manufacturing a transformer requires a lot of coordination between all the departments, from the designing team to the marketing and manufacturing departments. The whole process starts when a customer enquires about our transformer. We have to make presentation for the tender, which includes bills of material and the designing of the transformer according to the customer requirements. Sometimes we got a very short time to supply the product to the customer.”

Zeroing down on Teamcentre PLM

Crompton Greaves identified product lifecycle management (PLM) technology as the best bet to solve its problems ranging from design to manufacturing. PLM was chosen for its capability to integrate all the departments and automate the process of design and reuse of designers’ knowledge.

Crompton Greaves chose the PLM solution from UGS due to its previous experience in deploying other software solutions from the company. TCS took the pioneer role in the overall implementation process. Arora remarks, “We have taken120 licenses from UGS and this deployment is a part of our Rs 1.5 crore project. We have also deployed NX software design solution from UGS and taken 45 licenses. We selected the Teamcentre solution due to its flexibility and pricing.”

Extending PLM to other divisions

The implementation has helped Crompton Greaves to create a well planned knowledge repository and new designs developed by the design team have been added to it for future use. Tracing data as and when required is possible due to the automation of the systems and departments.

The deployment has integrated the departments, reducing the process time drastically. Prior to the deployment, presales activities starting from tender to the bills of material and presentation took an average of 39 days. Now the whole presales process consumes just about 23 days. The design cycle has been reduced by 30% for standard and custom parts, with an eventual reduction of 50%. The reduction in designing time of transformer has reduced the overall costs.

“All the departments are working in better coordination which has helped us reduce our delivery time and ultimately save our overall costs. Teamcentre is delivering better visibility and control for the service of products thereby establishing lean operations to achieve performance based logistics commitments,” mentions Arora.

After the successful implementation of the solution in its transformer division, Crompton Greaves now plans to extend the solution to other divisions. It also intends to use the solution to enable an extended enterprise and ad hoc collaboration framework for its business. The company is planning to completely transition to 3D, knowledge-based design across all divisions to enhance the business productivity.