Alan Smith, Director, new and emerging markets
Tell us a bit about your business. When were you founded, where are you based and how many people do you employ?
Enventive Engineering, Inc. is a privately held Delaware corporation established in 2002, committed to providing mechanical engineers with a software infrastructure supporting collaborative component-level and system-level organisation, synthesis, analysis, and optimisation of product functional information. Its HQ is in the USA, but it is a global organisation with over 25 staff working in America, Europe, and Asia. From the UK it also helps service Northern Europe and the Southern Hemisphere.
What does the business do?
Our software helps design and manufacturing engineers manage their dimensional data from concept through manufacturing. We work across all market sectors including automotive, aerospace, defence, and medical devices, with clients in over 30 countries. Our software assists manufacturers accelerate the rate at which they identify and solve potential problems during their product development process.
To cut time to market and maintain quality standards, manufacturers need to accelerate the rate at which they identify and solve potential problems during the product development process. Studies done by automotive and aerospace companies show that engineers spend 60% of a typical work week pursuing information held by suppliers, co-workers, and customers. Therefore, if manufacturers are going to cut down production time, one of the most effective strategies they can follow is to provide rapid access to critical information, and thereby dramatically reduce the time their engineers spend gathering data.
Around 70% of the company’s business is automotive, with a large proportion coming from Tier 1 and 2 suppliers for the commercial vehicle industry, such as Valeo. This in turn creates an end-to-end solution for improving product designs, reducing tolerance problems, reducing change orders, reducing time to market, and reducing manufacturing deviations. Better quality, faster to market, lower costs – this is our focus.
How is business? What’s the outlook for the year ahead?
2020 was an incredibly special year for the Enventive Team. As the first wave of Covid hit, we created a special event which offered furloughed Engineers and Designers a free opportunity to ramp up their skills with our solutions. Being able to stand up for our community of users at the worst possible time was especially important to us and strengthened the long-term relationship we like to build with each of them. In parallel, we partnered with several customers to make Enventive 360 – our Enterprise Tolerance Management solution – a strategic centrepiece of their product development process. This gave us the opportunity to hire three new developers at the end of 2020 and speed up our development.
Looking ahead, our major announcement of the year is certainly Enventive taking a leap into the 3D variational world; an 18-year planned move that we would not make until we had it right. For years, manufacturers have been asking for a non-specialist GD&T solution offering professional 3D variational capabilities and simple enough to get rid of the infamous Excel 1D hand-stack analysis. Building on our unique mathematical solver, Enventive 3D&T’s core objective is to deliver the computational power, simplicity and speed designers and engineers need to speed up their product time to market.
What are the big issues or technological advances that fill you with positivity?
Brexit and subsequently Covid significantly slowed investment throughout Europe and the rest of the world. However, the business climate following the pandemic will drive manufacturing companies to build a more digital and data-driven workforce to improve productivity. According to a recent industrial survey, 55% of the participants being “likely” to “very likely” to invest in Production Performance Automation in the next 12 months. It is no secret that automation and other technologies are worth it in almost every manufacturing facility type.
Today, more manufacturers are using data and automation to improve quality. But some manufacturers may be challenged with how to convert their data into actionable items. What tools to invest in that can tell them exactly how much risk they are taking on by bringing technologies into their facilities. Our enterprise tolerance management solution Enventive 360, has been trialling in a few of our large clients with great success and is showing we were correct in realising this need in industry nearly 10 years ago. Enventive 360 connects tolerance analysis models with FMEA data, CAD data, and measurement data. When an as-manufactured dimension is out of specification Enventive 360 instantly identifies all the affected tolerance stacks to assist in the company’s decision-making process. This can save days, weeks and sometimes even months of work.
This along with the launch of our new product, Enventive 3D&T later this year, we are looking forward to another successful year.
