Sanyo Electric, Home Appliances Company, motor applied products division, working jointly with Sanyo Electric Software, has implemented EDS's Teamcenter product lifecycle management (PLM) software solution to streamline its product development process.

The motor applied products division of Sanyo Electric, Home Appliances Company specialises in planning, developing, manufacturing and servicing small-sized, applied motor products. It is especially known as a pioneer in circulation type, reduced exhaust vacuum cleaners. Understanding the importance of total product management and the sharing of product information (including information from heterogeneous design and development systems), the division recognised a need to employ a product data management (PDM) system. After evaluating several systems, it selected EDS's Teamcenter to share product information, create an integrated bill of materials (BOM), streamline approval workflow and move from paper drawings to digital data management.

"Products such as vacuum cleaners contain numerous parts, so maintaining robust response performance against increasing parts structure information is crucial," said Kazuyuki Yamaguchi, of the Motor Applied Products division of Sanyo Electric, Home Appliances Company. "In addition, the ability to associate with existing systems and accommodate customisation was important in our choice of vendor. We believe that Teamcenter, with the world's largest PDM implementation in production, offers reliable proven technology, deep experience and crucial industry expertise.

The company began realising benefits from the first phase of the Teamcenter implementation in July, 2002. During this first phase, the goal was to use Teamcenter to associate, integrate and manage product information from existing systems including 2D data from CADRA, 3D CAD data from SolidWorks, product planning, cost accounting, mould data, and target cost systems, as well as an existing BOM system.

With Teamcenter in place, design engineers are now able to effectively capture and leverage complete product information for cost-effective product development and faster time to market.

Moving forward, Sanyo plans to use Teamcenter to create workflow approvals, 3D data management that meets with ISO requirements, and to associate Teamcenter with its own design know-how database to leverage its existing knowledge and experiences for future product development.

For more information contact Esteq Design Technologies, 012 991 5570.