Anwenderbericht

Whale Tankers: Productivity Initiative

Whale Tankers was established in 1969 and is now the largest manufacturer of liquid waste tankers and jetting equipment in Europe. A market leader in its field, the company exports to over 60 countries world-wide and supplies most local authorities, independent waste contractors and water companies in the UK.

The company’s stated aim is to continually improve the quality and value of its products, through design innovation, to maximise durability, reliability, easy of maintenance, fitness for purpose and residual value.Whale Tankers is working to guarantee shorter delivery lead times - in many cases reduced by 50 per cent and more - on all new vehicles. These much improved delivery lead times are to be achieved as a result of an on-going investment and modernisation programme initiated three years ago at the Whale factory site in Ravenshaw, Solihull. Over this period Whale has spent in excess of £2 million on driving productivity by introducing better working practices and creating bigger and better manufacturing facilities.

The latter includes investments in 3D CAD (SolidWorks), a state of the art paint shop using the most advanced spray systems in Europe, new better equipped workshops, additional service bays and highly sophisticated computer systems. In addition all current employees as well as new recruits have undergone and will continue to receive specialist training in their field.

Whale also anticipates that its investment in DriveWorks, design automation and productivity application will help the company even further. Commenting on Driveworks, John Dorney, of Whale said “We are now achieving dramatic productivity improvements as a result of the work we are able to do using Driveworks.”

There are two important time-saving elements to DriveWorks.

• The first being the ability to rapidly create variations of existing products and assemblies, either with an as needed procedure, or by mass, unattended creation. The effect of DriveWorks has been described as "like cloning your best engineer". Since DriveWorks frees up that engineering resource to concentrate on other more technical tasks by automating the routine.
  
• The second time-saving element is in the software’s ability to create a brand new product or assembly, based on rules, and then to add existing (or new cloned) sub-assemblies or parts to the main assembly.

DriveWorks is surprisingly easy to implement, with current users and administrators at Whale finding that the more the system is used, the greater its power. This is because the system ‘intelligently’ manages the design rules and relationships and how they behave within the design mechanism.

The forms are developed by DriveWorks from the technical specification spreadsheets that most engineering companies will already have developed. Using DriveWorks, experienced design engineers can either design from scratch or allow non-technical members of the company such as those involved in providing tenders and quotations, to develop variants of the company’s existing product range. This is because DriveWorks allows engineering knowledge to be shared, distributed and managed. Repetitive tasks can be devolved to non-technical staff or to the computer to process. This frees the engineers to get on with other more interesting and demanding tasks for which they were originally trained.

DriveWorks integrates with existing applications rather than replacing them. Interfaces included with the standard product include calculation spreadsheets and Bills of Materials. DriveWorks uses familiar tools like Microsoft Excel, already widely used at Whale whilst the provided data capture module makes sure that capturing design variables and rules is as easy as using SolidWorks. This ease of use and integration means that even the novice user can get to grips with the system very quickly.

Implementation time at Whale has been less than two weeks. When you consider that the closest applications to DriveWorks are traditional MRP driven configurators, that can take months if not years to implement, then the gains are significant. What’s more the programme adapts to the users products and culture rather than forcing a methodology change.