Dennis Eagle

Dennis Eagle
- Vehicle Design Data Management

As a manufacturer of refuse collection vehicles, Dennis Eagle today stands as Europe’s leading provider of complete vehicle solutions for the waste management industry.

The original system

In 2000, the engineering department changed their CAD system from 2-D AutoCAD to Solid Edge in time for the development of their new Phoenix 2 vehicle body. Their existing Enhancement 1 CAD Management system from Aprotec was not designed to manage solid models so for a year they worked without an electronic management system for newly produced models (in the hope that a new solution from their existing supplier would become available). In that time they produced approximately 16,000 Solid Edge files. Once it became apparent that a new solution from Aprotec was not imminent they turned to ESiT to provide an ADMiT system to manage all their designs (Solid Edge files, AutoCAD files and TIFF files).

The new system

The new ADMiT system went live in the summer of 2001, following an intensive data-transfer process. This was primarily concerned with importing the details of all 16,000 solid models into the database (as well as the data from the existing Enhancement 1 system). The main purpose of the initial system was to issue, control and manage Dennis Eagle’s drawings and solid models, via ADMiT’s workflow technology.

Since then the system has undergone a number of revisions to improve and extend its functionality. All live drawings are now available in a .pdf format via a searchable page on the company intranet.

The once paper-based product change control process is now managed electronically using ADMiT, ensuring the visibility of work throughout the business. For changes to drawings, ADMiT uses ‘effective from’ dates, which means that new, approved versions of a drawing are only available to production when this ‘effective from’ date has been reached.

webMiT

The solution for Dennis Eagle has recently been extended to their factory in Blackpool and to their parts and logistics partner, LEX Autologistics, by the introduction of a webMiT application running on the intranet. This allows them to immediately see the details of new changes and the modified or new drawing. It also enables them to raise change requests electronically.

In the near future, the webMiT application will be placed on a newly developed extranet, allowing suppliers to see the changes and modified drawings that affect them. This will have the benefit of reducing paperwork and generating an improved audit trail making it much easier to ascertain whether suppliers have received their drawings.

A timesheet logging and reporting system has also been introduced so that all time spent on projects by the engineering department is recorded. This allows management to see how much time is being spent on different types of work, enabling them to make more informed decisions.

The benefits

• Improved control of solid models and drawings and engineering processes
• Improved access to engineering drawings
• Greater visibility of information across the organisation
• Reduced Paperwork

Dennis Eagle (PDF - 94KB)