WITTUR Industrial Equipment case study

• Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
• Analytics & Modeling - Data Mining

• Equipment & Machinery

• Discrete Manufacturing
• Product Research & Development

• Manufacturing System Automation
• Predictive Maintenance

• System Integration
• Software Design & Engineering Services

Wittur, a leading manufacturer of elevator components, modules and systems, faced a challenge following a series of acquisitions. The company needed to leverage the massive amount of diverse data across its globally-located plants and to increase part reuse. As it acquired companies and established production plants and sales organizations around the world, Wittur found itself faced with a diverse IT environment that prevented its employees from easily finding and leveraging all of its information. Data was stored in different legacy SQL databases each with their own material codes, norms and structure, which had to be sifted through individually. This was extremely time-consuming. Another challenge was to reduce the number of duplicate parts in its system. The engineers were having difficulty finding existing parts for new projects, so they preferred redesigning them, even though, in many cases, a similar part existed. This continuous duplication of parts required additional storage space. It also drove up costs as redesigning a part includes R&D, manufacturing, testing, logistics and inventory, all activities that could be avoided if they could just find an existing part to fit the bill.

Wittur is a leading global supplier of components, modules and systems for the elevator industry. The company started out in 1968 as a manufacturer and distributor of elevator swing doors and experienced steady growth since then, both organically and through acquisitions. Wittur manufactures a wide range of elevator components from sophisticated mechatronic mechanisms for the cabin and landing doors to other components that include gearless drives, slings, safety gears, cars and braking systems. The company focuses on comfort and safety when designing its products. Wittur's customers are global elevator installers that include Kone, Otis, Schindler, Hitachi, and ThyssenKrupp Elevator as well as smaller independent installers operating on a more local scale. One of Wittur’s strengths is its ability to accurately analyze market trends, which enables it to anticipate its customers’ needs for innovative products.

To meet its challenges, Wittur chose the EXALEAD OnePart application as its global search solution. The company initially invested in 15 seats of OnePart for its 3D geometry searches and more recently deployed EXALEAD for its 2D drawing and metadata searches. For 3D search, one of OnePart’s advantages is its shape search feature, which locates part similarities and displays the closest parts in the search results. For 2D drawings, Wittur created its Drawing Information System (DIS), which is powered by EXALEAD. They are not only able to find the 2D drawings themselves, but all the metadata - part tolerances, material information, and where drawings are used - associated to each drawing. They can also display a component’s design history and show the latest revisions. Wittur takes advantage of EXALEAD’s many search possibilities by using its full-text search features, parent-child relationships, attributes-based data such as drawing codes, and filtering possibilities to narrow down the search.

• Wittur is able to search through its various data sources - SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional for geometry as well as other legacy SQL databases.
• EXALEAD helps Wittur find existing parts for reuse in new projects, which avoids unnecessarily creating new ones.
• EXALEAD is able to drill down to this level of detail, providing geography-specific search results.

• Reducing the time engineers spend looking for information by more than 20 hours per day.
• Represents over €180,000 per year in savings.