Online 3D CAD Model Solution for Consumer Electronics - Brother International Case Study | Catalog Data Solutions, Inc.
Brother International Corporation is one of the premier providers of products for printing, sewing, machine tools and gearmotors. Their U.S.A. corporate office, located in Bridgewater, New Jersey, was established in 1954 and markets many industrial products, home appliances, and business products manufactured by its parent company, Brother Industries, Ltd., of Nagoya, Japan. They recognized that the customer selection and buying process had changed because of technology. In response they have implemented the latest 'Cloud-based' (SaaS) technology to not only adapt their selling process to the modern customer sourcing process but also to make their sales process more efficient and effective.
The industrial selection and buying process has changed – many customers now research and select products online, often before even talking to a supplier. Our marketing and sales process needed to adapt to this new reality. We frequently received requests from customers for CAD models of our products – meeting these requests consumed valuable focus of new product design work.
We knew we were losing business by not having 3D drawings available. If design engineers couldn't find them they simply went elsewhere and we lost the sales opportunity. We needed to have a CAD download capability and we needed to have envelope CAD models built for us to use as our engineering support did not have the resources to build them for customers on an 'as requested' basis.
We started with a subset of our products - Brother's Mini, Water Resistant Mini, Mid and F3 Series Gearmotors and Reducers designed in response to the industrial demand for smaller, lighter, more reliable, and energy efficient power transmission.
We selected Catalog Data solutions (CDS) because their online catalog and CAD solutions were already well proven by many customers and because their professional services team could build all the required CAD models for this project.
We've changed our sales process to adapt to and efficiently take advantage of the new online customer selection and buying process and our customer's use of CAD. Our website is a key sales tool not only to enable customers to quickly find the 'right' product during their research but, equally importantly, customers can help themselves at their convenience by downloading our CAD models. By delivering CAD models we are able to save our customers valuable time and help them meet their product design deadlines.
Another advantage of working with CDS is that our product and CAD information is now centrally managed.
Now that we have online CAD models on our website we are advertising our products on CAD search engine, 3DModelSpace.com and drawing high quality visitors to our website.
The CDS solution has been an overwhelming success – it's now much easier for designers to narrow down their search to the right product quickly and immediately find and download the associated CAD model.
Customer feedback has been extremely positive, they say it's easy to find and get everything in one place. Overall we're delighted with the models CDS built for us, the ease of use of the parametric product search and CAD download experience for our customers as well as the flexibility, adaptability and support we receive from CDS.
Within the first few months we've generated 2-3 new small-medium sized OEMs. We don't usually get designed-in that quickly so we are already seeing a faster sales cycle.
I highly recommend CDS - everybody I've worked with at the company has been great and they have always come through on our requests!