Engineering integration saves time and boosts productivity at Stinis

When Mathieu joined Stinis 23 years ago, the company's largest international customer was located in Belgium. Since then, Stinis has grown steadily and now supplies container spreaders around the world. The company has expanded its workforce to over 100 employees based in both the Netherlands and Malaysia, and it also operates offices in Singapore and Shanghai.

The company's core belief is that it should not matter where their products are made — both engineering and production must be possible anywhere. When it gets busy in the Netherlands, Malaysia can step in, and vice versa. “That means we must be able to reuse each other's data,” de Vries explains. This led Stinis to reevaluate its integration of PDM and ERP systems in 2017.

Step 1: a new PDM solution

To continue working efficiently and make all product information accessible worldwide, Stinis first chose a new PDM solution: Autodesk Vault Professional. “We now use the same provider, CAD & Company, for both our 3D design tools and data management,” explains Mathieu. “It’s a great combination — fast, reliable, and easy to synchronize with our server in Singapore. Tasks like searching, printing, and compiling documents into complete information sets for RFQs are much easier now.”

Step 2: integration of PDM and ERP

The next step was upgrading to a newer version of Isah ERP. “All business and product information is now stored in a uniform Microsoft SQL database,” says Mathieu.“In Vault, we manage about 40,000 product items and 150,000 documents. Before the integration, our work preparation teams had to spend a lot of time collecting the correct drawings and files for production. For example, if a drawing had 30 bill-of-material lines, it could easily take two to three minutes per line to gather all related documents. Now, with Autodesk Vault fully integrated into Isah, the process takes seconds. All that information is available at the click of a button. What used to take hours now takes minutes. A conservative estimate shows that our global work preparation and purchasing team, consisting of about 20 people, each save roughly one hour per day. This translates into major time savings for the company."

Time savings create room for smarter production

Mathieu is highly enthusiastic about the efficiency gains Stinis has achieved and emphasizes how they also contribute to greater employee satisfaction: “Most people do not find administrative work the most enjoyable part of their job. Thanks to the integration and the time savings it brings, our colleagues can now focus more on challenging tasks — like figuring out how we can produce even smarter.”

De Vries is also very positive about the collaboration with Isah during this project. “The technical support from Isah consultants has always been excellent. The tools they developed for us to independently manage updates are also very user-friendly.”