Sanyo Machine Works Reinforces its Market Leadership with PLM Solutions from IBM and Dassault Systèmes

Company drives product innovation, achieves 25% parts reduction and a 60% development time cut using CATIA and SMARTEAM

Hannover Fair, April 11, 2005- IBM and Dassault Systèmes (Nasdaq: DASTY; Euronext Paris: #13065, DSYPA) today announced that Japan-based Sanyo Machine Works has chosen their Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions to increase manufacturing efficiency, drive product excellence and, as a result, reinforce its market leadership.

Sanyo Machine Works has used PLM solutions to reduce its pallet manufacturing time by 60%; to optimize design, which leads to a 25% reduction in the number of parts used; and to reduce the number of errors found at the final assembly stage by up to 40%. The company uses CATIA and SMARTEAM, IBM PLM solutions developed by Dassault Systèmes, as well as DELMIA for digital process definition, as the basis of a strategic corporate project with a generative design approach started in 2002.

Sanyo Machine Works, with 500 employees, is a leading provider of industrial automation systems. The company designs, manufactures and sells automated assembly and welding line systems to the automotive and consumer electronics markets. As a supplier in those highly competitive and rapidly changing markets, Sanyo Machine Works faces unique business challenges to provide its customers with superior manufacturing solutions and proactively exceed their expectations with high-quality and innovative products, added-value proposals, and expertise, all while reducing costs and delivery time internally to remain competitive.  

Sanyo Machine Works has been able to reduce lead time thanks to CATIA V5’s associativity mechanisms and knowledge-based infrastructure that enable the company’s designers to begin the design of an assembly line before the OEM has finished defining the product itself. This synchronous, rather than sequential, engineering process dramatically reduces lead time. SMARTEAM has also been key to Sanyo Machine Works due to its powerful integration capabilities. Through SMARTEAM, Sanyo Machine Works links its product definitions and analysis in CATIA V5 with manufacturing simulations in DELMIA; PLM data are connected to the company’s ERP system and are exchanged across the extended enterprise with suppliers and with customers.

“Introducing PLM solutions gave us a technical advantage over our rivals and helped us to become more competitive through innovative product development,” said Keita Horiba, managing director, Sanyo Machine Works. 

“PLM Solutions enable Sanyo Machine Works to propose high-performance, added-value solutions that distinguish the company from its competitors,”
says Junichi Takeuchi, vice president, IBM PLM, Asia Pacific. “Thus, Sanyo Machine Works has achieved clear and tangible benefits from its PLM implementation, resulting in a strengthened market position.”

"The key factor for line builders is to be able to design manufacturing lines in collaboration with their customers, while simultaneously validating the accuracy and operational effectiveness of the complete system,” said Christian Nardin, managing director, Dassault Systèmes Asia. “We are extremely pleased that an innovative company like Sanyo Machine Works has decided to transform its business processes with our PLM solutions to further enhance its competitive advantage.”