Corilam Fabricating Company (CFC, https://www.corilam.com/) was looking for a way to use bill of material data to improve their quotation and order acceptance turnaround times. They adopted Autodesk® Fusion 360™ as the front-end to their quoting process, but Fusion 360 does not support adding the required custom BOM properties to their design data. To add the data required to achieve their expected time savings, Corilam Fabricating Company (CFC) adopted Bommer for Fusion 360. Bommer was easy to install and configure; it enabled their engineers to populate the required properties on their library parts, and later extract a bill of materials from the accepted, quoted design without significant additional effort. Using Bommer, CFC achieved:
- 50% time savings during the quoting process, over manually generating the required information manually.
- Additional >50% time savings after quote is accepted, over manually gathering bill of materials data for the project engineers.
- Repeatability and a net reduction in the opportunity for manufacturing errors to occur.
- Set up in “minutes”.
Challenges
Corilam Fabricating Company is a leading manufacturer of furniture for the healthcare and educational markets. In order to streamline the order process and increase order throughput, they were developing an upfront presentation/estimating process; they would use this process to communicate designs clearly with their prospective customers, and then extract good quality data for order prep once a quote has been accepted. To achieve the right mix of ease of use and engineering depth, they adopted Autodesk Fusion 360 as the front end to this process, but the tools built into Fusion 360 make it hard to extract to bill of materials data and do not support custom properties that are critical to this process. Without additional BOM software, they would have had to spend time developing a solution to attach and extract metadata to their Fusion 360 parts, or spend significant time per project to hand-assemble the required part list or data.
How Bommer Helped
Bommer (https://www.getbommer.com) is a plugin for Fusion 360 that provides an in-app bill of materials editor, custom properties, and a “two-click” export process to help users quickly and easily build and extract their bills of materials. To implement their process, CFC built up a standard library of components within Fusion 360, and used Bommer to populate these components with bill of materials data. “The way that we envisioned it working is that we have a predefined library of products that are in Fusion that we've set up as templates” says Brad Robins, Owner and President, Corilam Fabricating Company. “We can pull those out, change some parameters, share that image with the customer, and get their feedback.” If their quote is accepted, then “the Fusion file will have the bill of materials requirements that we needed to get the order in and get materials ordered now”.
Bommer’s ability to define custom properties that are carried along with the Fusion 360 model gives CFC the ability to load and maintain the required bill of materials data, so that when a quote is generated or an order comes in, the bill of materials work is already mostly done. Bommer also makes it easy to export that bill of materials data at any stage of the process, which facilitates interaction with the customer. “There's a lot of work you don't want to have to do until your quote is accepted. The upfront process with the customer can take however many revisions it takes sometimes that can go on for several days, even several weeks sometimes sure, but when that order comes in, we then go back in, double check our data, and then export again.” says Robins about this process.
Results, Return on Investment, and Future Plans
By incorporating Bommer into their presentation and estimating process, Corilam Fabricating Company was able to realize significant time savings, which translates directly to increased order capacity and throughput, while delivering faster turnaround on quotes and orders. Robins estimates that CFC will realize a 50% time savings in preparing the sales presentation, and processing feedback from the customer; and at least a 50% time savings in preparing the order once the quote is accepted. He attributes this to not having to enter information multiple times, and the ability to automatically create the part list from the design artifact developed for the upfront sales estimate: “We've been drawing images and pictures [for our customers] for a long time, and you know, that gets the point across to the customer. Now, we are able to to pull that data out and start using that for estimating. In addition to that, the whole process of gathering that BOM information after the quote is accepted; this is going to create that listing automatically rather than having had a couple of people prepare and enter it.”
In the future, Robins sees Bommer as integral to achieving their quote turnaround and order processing time goals. To support this, they have started to expand their usage of Bommer to more members of their quoting/estimating team, and are planning to roll it out to additional users in the next 6 months.
Authors
Brad Robins - Owner and President, Corilam Fabricating Company
Jesse Rosalia - Co-founder/CEO, Bommer, Inc.
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