Georg Fischer Piping Systems Manages Pipe System Drawings and Plans with Centralized Product Lifecycle Management
 
 

Georg Fischer Piping Systems Manages Pipe System Drawings and Plans with Centralized Product Lifecycle Management

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Georg Fischer Piping Systems designs, manufactures, and markets piping systems for the safe and secure conveyance of liquids and gases. The company belongs to the Georg Fischer Group and sells over 40,000 products for diverse applications and specialized markets: jointing technology, fittings, valves, measuring devices, and pipes that are used for water conveyance and treatment as well as the transport of liquids and gases for industrial purposes. It has 25 sales companies worldwide that ensure competent customer support and the rapid availability of its products.
 
While the company’s range of highly specialized systems configured to meet the needs of many industries—from ship building, to chemical processing, to water and gas utilities—serve as its key differentiator, this is also the source of its greatest complexity. Since its inception, Georg Fischer Piping Systems faced challenges related to effectively managing plans for its piping systems. This problem continued to grow exponentially along with the company’s increasing number and variety of products.

In 2004, Georg Fischer Piping Systems addressed this key business challenge by introducing a system for managing drawings and plans. Since then, it has expanded this initiative with the deployment of Oracle's Agile Product Lifecycle Management. Today the company organizes product families and corresponding product variants with the solution, which is fully integrated into its IT infrastructure.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Georg Fischer Piping Systems

  • “With Oracle's Agile PLM, we can base our product development on a single source of data, which speeds up and improves all related processes.” – Alejandro Condesa, Product Lifecycle Management System Manager, Georg Fischer Piping Systems Consistently Manages Pipe System Drawings and Plans with Centralized Product Lifecycle Management Systems

  • Manage exponential growth in product variance
  • Provide technicians with a unique structure for drawing and archiving plans that will accelerate piping system development and ensure consistency regardless of which technician is working on a plan
  • Make it easier to find older piping system plans in archives to save time
  • Get piping systems to market faster by enabling reuse of existing plans’ elements
  • Streamline time-consuming transport of paper plans to production sites, a process which required users to rely on existing truck shipments to deliver plans

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Worked with Oracle Partner ICP Solution GmbH to deploy Oracle's Agile product lifecycle management applications (Agile PLM) to create a robust product lifecycle management system for the company’s piping systems
  • Enable 160 technicians with a unique structure for drawing and archiving plans as well as easily finding product variants already stored to accelerate the go-to-market process while ensuring consistency
  • Established Agile PLM as the primary system for managing master product data as well as sales support data, which sped up new plans by enabling users to retrieve data on older projects and reuse elements, if possible, rather than design a new plan from scratch
  • Introduced change management and parts management for piping systems, enabling users to organize product families and correspondent product variants to further accelerate plan development
  • Implemented a configuration system to simplify the process of customizing products, gaining mastery of product variants and ultimately saving time and money
  • Reduced by 90% the time required to respond to specific customers requests, freeing the sales team to focus on other business opportunities

Partner

Oracle Partner ICP Solution GmbH helped Georg Fischer Piping Systems to optimize the product development process and implement Oracle’s Agile PLM solution. Starting with the company’s drawing and plan management system as a foundation, ICP Solution introduced a system for managing plan changes and configurations. Today, the partners tackle remaining challenges in the product life cycle with the help of Agile PLM, such as the process for printing labels for mass-produced products.