ANCA Transforms Its Product Creation Processes

When it needed to update its platform ANCA turned to AESSiS to help it develop and implement its new strategy.

About ANCA

Headquartered in Melbourne, Australia and with design and manufacturing operations in Germany, Taiwan & Thailand, ANCA is a market leading manufacturer of high quality CNC tool and cutter grinders. The winner of over 25 industry awards, the company’s success is founded on its innovative designs and engineering skills which have enabled it to combine leading edge technology with operating simplicity.

To further cement their success, during 2015 ANCA instigated a review of their PLM tools and processes during which they identified opportunities to improve their business by;

  • Increasing the level of integration across ANCA companies, departments and systems around the world.

  • Using common tools for CAD, CAM, CAE & PLM and licencing those tools globally.

  • Building common processes for product creation.

 These improvements would, in turn, help deliver;

  •  Improved agility, flexibility and responsiveness to customer requirements.

  • Improved profitability of ANCA products.

  • Improved quality of ANCA products.

  • Reduced Design to Manufacture lead times.

ANCA Selects Aras

The ANCA machine tools division had been a long time user of NX for CAD design combined with Teamcenter for CAD data management. On the other hand, the ANCA Motion division, which makes control systems for machine tool makers had adopted Aras some years previously.

After careful analysis of the relative costs of deployment and ownership and impressed by the flexibility of the Aras technology and its speed of deployment, ANCA selected Aras for implementation across all ANCA businesses whilst continuing to use NX for CAD which would be integrated into Aras via the Aras-NX connector from XPLM.

ANCA Selects AESSiS as Its Aras Implementation Partner

ANCA quickly recognised that it needed a partner experienced in Teamcenter, NX and Aras and selected AESSiS because of the company’s successful track record in these systems.

Delivering The Project

ANCA were maintaining around 180,000 CAD and CAM item masters in their old Teamcenter 2005 environment with many times more item revisions and some of the CAD files dating back 20 years and more.

This valuable data needed to be quickly and accurately migrated to Aras. Of course to migrate this volume of data, you have to have a system to migrate into. So the first task faced by the AESSiS team was to create an Aras environment with broadly similar capabilities to the Teamcenter environment which was to be retired.

Working together with ANCA, the AESSiS team quickly;

  • Extended the Aras CAD data model to accommodate the full complexities of the CAD and CAM data arriving from Teamcenter.

  • Configured the desired release processes

  • Enabled Aras’s visualisation capability built around the 3D PDF standard

  • Set up distributed file volumes & file replication across ANCA’s design offices around the world.

  • Configured the NX CAD connector so that designers could check in and out their designs as before.

 

The AESSiS team then began the task of extracting the many thousands of NX files stored in Teamcenter.

The team employed the AESSiS PLM Migration Toolkit to;

  • Analyse the extracted data & files to identify all the item types and relationship types in use.

  • Identify what data would be in scope for migration to Aras (ANCA wanted to leave some junk data behind).

  • Create the necessary mapping to import the data to Aras.

 Following a number of test runs supported by robust customer validation testing, the team executed the final migration of data into Aras.

Thanks to the sophistication of the AESSiS PLM Migration Toolkit and the integrity of the migration approach, the data was migrated accurately and switch over to Aras was accomplished during a single weekend thus minimising downtime.

Future PLM Roadmap

With the ANCA Machine Tools mechanical data now migrated into Aras, the ANCA Group now wish to turn Aras into a group wide Enterprise PLM “Backbone”. This will include the following initiatives;

  • The currently separate ANCA Motion and ANCA Machine Tools Aras environments will be merged.

  • A fully integrated mechatronic BOM will be created and managed within Aras.

  • Full Quality and Change Management will be rolled out.

  • A seamless PLM-ERP integration will be implemented.

 

This is an ambitious undertaking and it will continue to transform how ANCA engineer and bring their products to market improving product quality, increasing profitability and cutting deliver lead times.