The CADENAS Industry Forum Italy 2022 as an exchange platform for industry and component manufacturers

On May 8th, 2019, the last official Industry Forum Italy powered by CADENAS took place at the Hotel Calzavecchio in Casalecchio di Reno, Italy. Three years later, on October 6th, 2022, professionals from industry and component manufacturing now gathered at the Hotel once more, to exchange information about the latest innovations and the newest technological developments.

As a "place-to-be", the event organized by CADENAS offers all professionals and executives the opportunity to learn about and follow the latest technologies, as well as developments and trends in the industry. Through success stories and presentations, Industry Forum attendees learned about how solutions developed by CADENAS have benefited their companies in cost reduction, parts reuse, lead generation, and more.

As a manufacturer of high-quality control cabinets for the world of automation, ETA has been able to establish itself worldwide since 1978. However, in collaboration with CADENAS, the company made in Italy has now managed to significantly increase the number of its international leads. "We published the ETA catalog developed by CADENAS in May and to date we have 189 new qualified leads as a result. 53 percent of them are foreign companies," Francesco Basta, Sales & Marketing Manager at ETA S.p.A tells during his presentation.

Among the main advantages of eCATALOGsolutions, Francesco Basta mentions the great usability of technical information. ETA's focus is on improving the usability of technical information for the market and potential new customers, so this point is fundamental for the manufacturer. For ETA, digitalization means making all information technologies available and focusing on product marketing. With eCATALOGsolutions, it is now possible for them to implement all these goals.

Founded in 1919, SACMI, international manufacturer of machines and complete plants for the ceramic tile, quality control and plastics industries, was represented at the Industry Forum Italia by Master Data Manager Davide Arianna. Here, the company found clear words for its partners: component manufacturers must observe certain criteria in order to be able to successfully sell their products to the industry in the future.

For this purpose, it is necessary to provide comprehensive technical information for easy understanding of the catalog data and the coding conventions. Information such as references to the supplier's catalog, the material weight of the respective components, a redefinition of the level of detail of 3D CAD models, and much more would have to be provided in the manufacturers' product catalogs in order to be able to guarantee smoother, more efficient workflows. Faster action is also needed when updating catalogs: In some cases, products are updated, but the information about this is received late by customers and users.

The Italian-based manufacturer cites CADENAS as the solution to all these concerns. SACMI currently works with 163 of the catalogs provided by CADENAS. The goal of the work with the German software manufacturer was to optimize engineering. With the help of the 3D search engine 3Dfindit.com powered by CADENAS, as well as the Strategic Parts Management PARTsolutions, they succeeded. The procurement of 3D models and the 3D comparison regarding the overall dimensions and sizes of components is considerably simplified, as manufacturers can simply provide the required 3D data on 3Dfindit.com. This data can then be easily transferred to the familiar CAD system. Since complete and consistent information is directly available, information transfer is also improved, which in turn leads to an improvement in the supply chain.

As the industry relies on just such optimizations, SACMI thus advises component manufacturers to integrate their catalogs into 3Dfindit.com and therefore become not only more attractive to users, but also more visible to potential new customers.

Tetra Pak, the multinational food packaging and processing manufacturer, was also present at Industry Forum Italia and was represented by Peterhenry Proto, Manager MDM & Corporate Standards and Alex Trolli, Mechanical CAD Expert Advisor. The Swedish-Swiss company has already had excellent experience with GEOsearch, the Geometric Search developed by CADENAS. The program, which specializes in comparing parts based on CAD geometries and thus finding the most similar parts, has already been able to save Tetra Pak 20% of normal duplicates. In addition, Geometric Similarity Search allowed the company to reuse 2% of the parts that were already in the database. This saved valuable time and resources. Tetra Pak hopes to achieve a significant reduction in duplicates and holding costs in the future by using CADENAS' Strategic Parts Management. Savings of €1,400 per year for each eliminated part are expected, as well as consolidating the use of existing parts and reducing design effort.

A review of the 20th Industry Forum 2019.