Grant Prideco reduces lead times with product management software
Houston-based Grant Prideco, a drill pipe manufacturer and provider of drill stem technology, has begun using RuleStream Corp.’s rules-driven product management software to improve its order-fulfillment process and reduce design and engineering time.
Houston-based Grant Prideco, a drill pipe manufacturer and provider of drill stem technology, has begun using RuleStream Corp .’s rules-driven product management software to improve its order-fulfillment process and reduce design and engineering time. RuleStream 5.6 allows users to generate complete quotations, engineering, and manufacturing drawings and reports at the time of quotation. The software allows users to capture rules about requirements, best practices, and capabilities for engineering, manufacturing, and sales.
Needing to handle as many as 200 orders per month, the previous system Grant Prideco employed could not keep pace with the company’s engineer-to-order needs. By increasing the speed and accuracy of the quotation process, extending its design automation capabilities, and improving retention and reuse of product knowledge, Grant Prideco reduced drawing time for its DrillPipe product from 10 hours to 10 minutes.
Grant Prideco intends to use RuleStream to bridge its internal ERP system (Movex) with SolidWorks to allow automatic project options, such as pipe length and diameter, to be made available during the order process, as well as to incorporate printed drawings and specification sheets with orders.
RuleStream 5.6 supports SolidWorks 2005 3D mechanical design software. By integrating with SolidWorks 2005, RuleStream 5.6 ensures that automated product decisions reflect a manufacturer’s most up-to-date product-based intellectual property. It also allows design and manufacturing engineers to see the impact of configuration changes on the product design in real-time.
SolidWorks is available to the end-user through the RuleStream environment.
Other features of version 5.6 include:
Release models created using XML;
Import XML into the current project/line item;
Supports customer driven, dynamic quantity of process steps; and
User-defined fields for both projects and line items—these fields can also be drop-down lists with table-driven values.
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—David Greenfield, editorial director, Control Engineering, dgreenfield@reedbusiness.com
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