Smith & Wesson improves design process with Dassault PLM software

Bob Shumsky, PLM systems administrator at Smith & Wesson, says the company chose the system to improve efficiency in product design and development, by enabling employees worldwide to collaborate on designs and share up-to-date product information. Initially started as a system to replace the company’s paper-based processes, Smith & Wesson went with Enovia Engineering Central to manage engineering change requests and orders, and to automate the associated business processes. Since then, its phased adoption of PLM has evolved out to the shopfloor, where product design information stored in Enovia is accessed by scanning production kanban cards – giving operators information in real time. “With Enovia we are able to automate business processes, communicate more efficiently, both internally and externally, aggregate parts and product quality data, and capture what we call our tribal knowledge to build best practices,” says Shumsky. “The most obvious benefit has been faster cycles in design, and production drawing approval times have been decreased by 75% and ECO approval times by 57%. Overall, we have improved real-time visibility into engineering changes and the flexibility to make them,” he adds. Currently, 200 design, sales, finance, procurement and marketing personnel have access to a collaborative environment. Smith & Wesson is now looking at creating a centralised database to allow for common parts identification and to improve its efficiency in capturing and re-using institutional knowledge.