Ketiv Technologies

Cost Savings and Agility: Idaho Steel's Digital Transformation Triumph

Idaho Steel is comprised of a group of smart engineers who like to self-discover and hone their process and technology solutions. They’ve been using Autodesk for 25+ years, starting with AutoCAD.  In 2019, consistent with their DIY culture, Idaho Steel introduced computers to the fabrication shop after learning how other manufacturers benefited from this practice. Despite concerns over the longevity of computers in an atmosphere rife with fabrication dust, shock, and other irritants, the employees on the floor loved having direct access to the blueprint. No more scattered papers. Digitization looked promising. More than just the shop floor, COVID forced Idaho Steel to reinvent how to communicate and collaborate more effectively company-wide. The pandemic served as an accelerant to Idaho Steel’s inclination towards the adoption of technology. As the company emerged from the constraints of COVID, they experienced a boon in orders and production, and they knew digital transformation could provide a real opportunity to scale.  Some employees were exploiting the training and experience gained working at Idaho Steel to serve as a springboard to land jobs in a nearby government facility. Keeping long-term talent, improving collaboration between sales, engineering, and production—these elements of success became more critical.

Superior Tank Boosts Cycle Times by Automating and Expanding Core Design Process

Superior Tank’s typical manual layout process takes about three to four days. Their workflow had mostly kept up with customer demand–until COVID hit. First, the pandemic created staffing challenges. Later, Superior Tank took on a flood of orders while still understaffed, leaving the design team with a backlog of designs to punch out.Superior Tank prides itself on creating well-detailed drawing packages that are highly regarded by both their manufacturing team and customers. But they wanted to achieve faster design-to- production time while maintaining the same high level of precision. What Superior Tank needed was a system that allowed their designers to extend upon their existing Autodesk Vault Professional library. This library is comprised of thousands of previously drawn and approved designs which are referred to as kits. These kits allow their designers to find and re-use previous tank designs when fulfilling new orders. However, there’s not always a corresponding kit available for every new order.“We were trying to speed up the process of doing the tank design portion of our product line…it was getting time consuming having to make so many different iterations of a similar product.”Jeff Jones, Engineering Manager at Superior Tank CompanyMany orders for new tanks are so similar in size and scope as previous ones, but the slightest deviation means the team is tasked with having to manually draft a new blueprint in the Autodesk Inventor library. In Superior Tank’s instance, each part, every assembly, all accessories-down to the tiniest nuts and bolts in the hardware packs—resides in this library.They needed an automated solution that was both repeatable and reliable, equally smart and accessible. The good news: the design team, despite their reduced head count, had always worked smart: what they needed was the ability to extend on what they already had.

Vault Automation Reduces Manual Tasks and Time to Market for Bauer Compressors

The first step to reaching Bauer Compressors' goal was to speed up their nesting capabilities for sheet metal parts. They implemented a third party nesting solution that they hoped would meet their needs and free up time for laser programmers. However, this new program did not integrate well with their existing Vault infrastructure, which is essential to their designers.