Case Study
Making it big in baked goods
Back-Tech Maschinenbau und Handelsges. mbH
Solid Edge and Teamcenter Express help an Austrian manufacturer of food production machinery strengthen its market position
PLM for daily bread
Back-Tech develops, produces and sells machinery used by commercial and industrial bakeries. Specifically, Back-Tech’s systems are used in the production (but not the actual baking) of small baked goods, a category that includes items such as rolls, doughnuts, pretzels and hamburger buns. Partners Georg Knill, Franz Hadolt and Adolf Gruber explain the company’s mission this way: “We want to be one of the leading system suppliers in our core competence of dough preparation in the commercial and industrial area, and to deliver products with a technological advantage and high quality.”
Since its inception in 1986, Back-Tech has concentrated on the small baked goods niche, a concentration that has helped it achieve steady growth. The company has 80 employees and more than 1,500 systems installed worldwide. Its product line extends from machines that perform individual tasks to complete systems that perform the entire manufacturing process automatically – from portioning the dough and shaping it, to placing it on a baking sheet.
Data and documents were critical
Bakeries value flexibility in their production equipment.“Although we have a range of standard machines that are built in series, most of our machines are adapted to the customer’s specifications or are designed entirely in accordance with the customer’s needs,” explains Heimo Gödl, technical manager at Back-Tech. The machines can perform many different tasks – such as dividing the dough into weight-controlled portions, shaping the portions by rolling, folding and scoring, finishing them with dusting and even aligning them precisely for even baking – depending on the customer’s requirements.
Creating these custom systems is the work of Back-Tech’s product development department, a six-man design team that has a long history of using technology to work more efficiently. In 2006, the department decided to upgrade from 2D design to 3D modeling. In choosing the new CAD software, document and data management capabilities were some of the most important requirements. The new system needed the ability to import data from and export data to the company’s ERP system, for example. It also required document management functionality equal to or better than the existing system, and with a tight link to the CAD system. As for CAD functionality, the department was looking for a 3D program that would be simple to learn and efficient to use.
Another consideration for the new system was that it needed to be “future-proof,” as developer and designer Bernhard Schwarz explains.“It needed to be future-proof because we were already thinking about adding functionality for data exchange and collaboration, as well as an integrated release procedure,” Schwarz says.“Any new system needed to support these future plans.” Also, in order to leverage design knowledge accumulated over more than twenty years, the new system needed to be able to manage the enormous pool of existing drawings.
These requirements determined that only a CAD system with a comprehensive product data management (PDM) component would be considered. Two products were evaluated, and in the end, Back-Tech chose the Solid Edge® 3D modeling system and the Teamcenter® Express PDM solution. Several features made the decision in favor of this combination.One was the extensive functionality of both the CAD and the PDM programs, along with their ease of learning and use. Another was the seamless integration between the two programs. Third was the availability of the entire system from one source. Finally, the Siemens PLM Software sales partner, ACAM Systemautomation GmbH, could program the interface to the ERP system without adaptations on the ERP side.
A professional implementation
The professionalism of the implementation proved that this decision was a good one. ACAM implemented the ERP interface and imported existing data into Teamcenter Express. As many as 15,000 parts lists with 130,000 items were imported from the ERP system. In addition, 27,000 drawings, 6,000 standard parts and 3,500 temperature curves were transferred from the previous data management system. The company took this opportunity to merge and clean up the data, eliminating errors, duplications and inconsistencies that had crept in over the course of many years.
Initially, the old and new systems were run in parallel while people gained experience with Solid Edge and Teamcenter Express. Single part drawings were created first and then more complex procedures, such as approval processes, parts list transfer and PDF/DXF import and export were added in a manageable framework. As the Solid Edge assemblies grew, it was possible to test and optimize the adaptations made by ACAM (such as a routine for summarizing and sorting frame components into a manufacturing layout list). To make sure that the parallel operation didn’t cause problems, ACAM created a communication interface that imported the 2D parts list information and drawings created by the old system into Teamcenter Express.
“We gained proficiency and familiarity with Solid Edge surprisingly quickly,” reports Schwarz.“This gave us the confidence to make the complete switch.” The transition took place after five days of training during which the design team developed a 14-meter (46 feet) long and 3.5-meter (11 feet) high doughnut fermentation plant in Solid Edge.“Although many usable parts from older projects were available in the form of 2D drawings and would have been easy to access using Teamcenter Express, we decided to recreate 95 percent of them in Solid Edge so that we could use them in collision detection studies,” Schwarz notes.
Better than expected efficiency gains
Today, Back-Tech’s designers can hardly imagine how they coped with their workload using the old system. Their greater efficiency is one of the advantages of top-down development, which begins with the layout of the entire project in Teamcenter Express. Typically several designers work on one project simultaneously, with Teamcenter Express automatically handling the access and revision control. Designers’ time that used to be spent on these tasks has been almost completely eliminated.
A greater part of the increase in efficiency – even more than Back-Tech had hoped for initially – is due to the re-use of previously designed parts. These are not only easier to find, but they can be adapted to a new project with little effort on the part of the designer. In fact, since the implementation Solid Edge and Teamcenter Express, designers can now spend more of their time designing, while relying on the software to handle mundane chores automatically and in the background. Thanks to this successful and on-schedule implementation of Solid Edge and Teamcenter Express, Back-Tech is closer to fulfilling its mission of being one of the leading system suppliers in the field of small baked goods.
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Back-Tech Maschinenbau und Handelsges. mbH
Challenges:
- Short development times
- Customer-specific, modular machinery
Keys To Success:
- Upgrade to 3D modeling with integrated knowledge management
- Interface to ERP system
- Accessibility of legacy data
- Products and services from one source
Results:
- Increased design efficiency
- Interference checking of assemblies before manufacturing components
- Comprehensive knowledge management
- Improved re-use of existing components and design information
Industry:
- Machinery & Industrial
Client's Primary Business:
Back-Tech develops, produces and sells machinery for commercial and industrial bakeries.
Business Initiatives:
- Commonization & Re-use
- New Product Development
- Production Efficiency
Solutions/Services:
- Solid Edge
- Teamcenter Express
- Velocity Series
Client Location:
St. Ruprecht an der Raab
Austria
"We gained proficiency and familiarity with Solid Edge surprisingly quickly."
Heimo Gödl
Technical Manager
Back-Tech Maschinenbau und Handelsges. mbH