Svanehøj, formerly a part of Wärtsilä group, is a Danish market-leading manufacturer of specialized deep well pumps for the marine industries within the areas of gas pumps, fuel pumps, associated products and chemicals, offshore products, as well as sales and after-sales services.

Svanehøj wanted to invest in a product lifecycle management system that could connect their product data and support their work processes and business goals. With Teamcenter, from Siemens Digital Industries, implemented by Nextage, Svanehøj found a way to unify their product information into a comprehensible digital thread.

Svanehøj chose Teamcenter implemented with Nextage Value Package (NVP). They saw the benefits of NVP, with its half pre-configured and half customer-specific setup of Teamcenter providing a data model, workflows, and reports. The package let Svanehøj get started promptly with a platform for product lifecycle management.

The result is increased data quality, and time -saving in smoother work processes.

Susannah Lund is Engineering Manager at Svanehøj:

“Tasks that earlier took days to do, are now completed in a few minutes, thanks to the workflows that interface to our ERP system. This time-saving is amongst the greatest improvements along with the increased data quality. We spend our time where we want to spend it, on innovation, not administration.”

The Teamcenter PLM project started on December 28th, 2018. One of the risk factors was that Svanehøj only had four months to move out and export their data from Wärtsilä’s systems. In that short period, they scrutinized their work processes and decided on how they wanted to work in the future.

Svanehøj turned to Siemens partner Nextage to help implement and configure Teamcenter. As a part of being Svanehøj’s implementation partner, Nextage became an important expert discussion partner in developing and implementing new ways of working and finding solutions to data challenges.

Susannah Lund joined Svanehøj in March 2019 as a Design Engineer Manager and was instantly assigned project manager of implementing Teamcenter, a project that had already started. Her many years of experience working with product development processes was a big help.

Susannah Lund had several eye-openers during the pre-installation process.

“In the beginning, Nextage asked a lot of questions and challenged our way of working. I soon realized that specific solutions were suggested for a reason”, says Susannah Lund. “It was very valuable for us to have a discussion partner that dared to challenge our ways of working and suggest solutions unknown to us. This is as opposed to a partner that builds what the customer asks for without questioning or urging the customer to consider future scenarios.”

The design engineers follow the same processes

Time savings in the reuse of data with CAD/part separation in Teamcenter following Nextage’s advice

Before implementing Teamcenter with NVP, Svanehøj’s designers did not have a united way of working. Now work is more streamlined which increases productivity and makes it easier to introduce new members to the team.

Svanehøj worked with 1 design: 1 part. With the new data model in NVP, one design can have any number of parts. When a design is used in multiple parts Svanehøj’s designers do not have to update as many designs as before if a change is done. This way of working is more flexible, more structured, and the engineers work as a team in order to reuse data.

The same goes for projects where instead of creating multiple drawings for different projects, one drawing can point to several projects. If a drawing is revised, all projects connected to that drawing are updated simultaneously once the drawing is amended.

The time saving for the design engineers and the project team as well as the control over revisions was significantly increased by this way of working.

Time saved also by connecting variants to parts
Svanehøj also works with separated variants to parts. From working with one drawing per variant, they now work with basic geometric design shapes to which they can add variants such as different material, color, capacity, or accessory.

“We are growing and needed to streamline ourselves to work smarter. We are not isolated but work in connection with others and the world. The world is getting more complicated and we move with it”, says Susannah Lund.