2005 C.I.P.A. Winners

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3L Filters Ltd.

Automated Technical Quotation System

3L Filters Ltd. is an engineer-to-order manufacturer of complex filtration pressure vessels, based in Cambridge, Ontario. In operation since 1965, the company has 50 employees and sells its products in 17 countries.

Serving the nuclear market in China, Korea, Romania, Argentina and Canada, for example, 3L Filters products are used in CANDU reactor environments as filtration systems for the primary heat-transfer transport, dryer systems for removing heavy water from the air within the reactor, and in tritium recovery systems.

For other customers such as Shell Chemical, Formosa Chemical and Corning, 3L Filters products are used in refining industries, chemical processes, water treatment plants, and in aviation and automotive applications. Filter vessels from 3L Filters can be found anywhere gases and liquids at high pressures must be contained and filtered.

Challenges

To respond to requests from prospective customers for a price quotation for a new vessel, the sales staff at 3L typically require the Engineering group to perform a technical evaluation of the customer's specifications and then provide a proposed design solution, along with the associated drawings. 3L was finding, however, that supporting the sales proposal work on the nuclear industry side of its business was consuming most of its engineering resources. As a result, 3L was experiencing difficulty responding to quotation requests from its industrial-market customers and its revenue was stagnating.

"More than 80 per cent of our resources were being consumed to support only 50 per cent of our business," says Kevin Cassells, engineering manager at 3L Filters.

"To increase our revenue in a market sector that has a growing need for engineering support, we needed to find a way to solve our resource-limitation problem."

Objectives

In adopting the NeXtreme Automation system from Tryllium Industries, 3L was attempting to address important business objectives.

Perhaps the most important of these was to help the sales team win more orders and increase revenue by giving them an automated sales quotation tool that would enable them to be more responsive to customer requests. In addition, 3L saw an opportunity to not only improve engineering productivity but also to enrich the nature of the engineering work, thereby increasing employee satisfaction and loyalty while reducing turnover.

Solution

To meet its objectives, 3L implemented NeXtreme Automation, a Web-based enterprise-resource-automation application that enables non-technical salespeople to design, price and present engineering drawings for pressure vessels in just minutes - without engineering assistance.

The system, which generates 3D digital models, drawings and quotations automatically, enables 3L Filters to combine industry standards and best practices, as well as make use of its own proprietary knowledge about customers and products, to automate routine technical tasks.

"Our products are typically highly engineered, requiring very experienced people," says George Foss, owner of 3L Filters. "By thinking a little outside the box, we found a way to capture engineering knowledge permanently and use it to our continuous advantage, thus reducing the potential impact if there's any staff turnover."

NeXtreme ERA consists of the UGS Solid Edge 3D parametric solids assembly CAD engine, a Microsoft SQL database, a library of geometric objects, Microsoft Office tools, various document output format drivers, and Tryllium's own proprietary application software, customized for 3L.

In consultation with a customer, a 3L sales rep can enter high-level specifications into the system, which then automatically generates detailed, full-scale digital prototypes and a price, and provides all the bills of material required for purchasing the required materials and process steps for fabricating and testing the final product - all without needing any involvement by engineering, purchasing or estimating staff.

By delivering a much more professional quote package - and doing so in only three days compared with the previous 14 - the NeXtreme Automation system has enabled 3L salespeople to improve their quote conversion success ratio to 25 per cent from eight, yielding a 28-per-cent increase in revenue for 3L over the past two years.

The system has eliminated mundane, repetitive work in 3L's Engineering department and reduced the stress formerly caused by continual process backlogs. With hundreds or even thousands of hours of effort saved, 3L engineers are now focused more on new-product development.

Innovative Use of Technology

Through the use of a generic-language programming interface, NeXtreme Automation harnesses the powerful functions of the CAD engine to build geometry, change shapes and modify dimensions, yielding an exact, full-scale, 3D digital replica of the proposed vessel. In addition to giving customers a clear picture ahead of time of what they are buying, it ensures that everyone at 3L - from the shop floor to the CEO - knows exactly what they sold and what they're supposed to be building throughout the entire design, purchasing, fabrication and testing process.

"Although this initially started off as a sales support tool, we see an opportunity to extend its usefulness into the Engineering department to help them improve the efficiency of their design and modeling activities," concludes Cassells.

A 2005 CIPA Winner!

For its exceptional application of information technology to solve real-world business problems and bring greater benefit to all its stakeholders, 3L Filters Limited was recognized as the Diamond Best of Show winner at the 2005 Canadian Information Productivity Awards Gala Banquet honouring excellence for innovation. The company was also awarded a Gold Best of Category Award in the Organizational Transformation, For Profit category.

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