Schneider Electric, the worldwide specialist in energy
management, deploys its activities in five markets:
• Energy & infrastructure
• Industry
• Data centers & networks
• Buildings
• Residential
It has 123,000 employees around the world in 130 countries,
and all its products are commercialized under the Schneider
Electric brand (previously Telemecanique and Merlin Gerin
amongst others). Buildings, industry, infrastructures…
Schneider Electric is present wherever electricity is
required and must be controlled. Products are commercialized
via a network of dealers, using a direct sales method aimed
at the major industrial corporations (automotive sector,
machine manufacturers, etc.).
William Jeanson heads the Data Project for the Technical
Communication department of Industrial Machine & Process
based in L'Isle-d’Espagnac in the Charente region, France.
In particular he is in charge of improving the range's
technical presentation.
In the 1980s William Jeanson worked in design for
Telemecanique, and was then integrated into the Schneider
Electric group. Customers already frequently wanted
"electronic drawings", and the company occasionally
provided them. With the boom in 3D design, these requests
became too complex to deal with, mainly because of the huge
number of formats and constant software development.
When William Jeanson became in charge of technical
communication for the range, he focused on meeting this need
to improve customer service, and looked into several
solutions available on the market. In 2003 TraceParts was
the obvious choice: "Our decision
was based above all on technical criteria. TraceParts was
the only supplier covering all the main market standards and
formats. In addition, the quality of its catalogs and
resulting success with CAD/CAM customers made it a vital
partner."
The first library was for Telemecanique Sensors to meet the
needs of machine manufacturers. This was followed by
signalling, Man-Machine dialog elements and all the
components making up the control cabinet (contactors,
relays, speed variators, etc.).
Today Schneider Electric supplies the 2D drawings to
TraceParts, as well as a "classification pyramid" of
components. External partners then simplify the drawings, so
as to conserve intellectual property of the components but
at the same time reduce downloading volume as far as
possible. Only the outer casing is modeled, but the assembly
and fixing points are defined precisely. TraceParts then
generates the 3D components.
François Janvier is the "Image" manager at Technical
Communication, and is responsible for regular communications
with TraceParts: "Our components are designed in-house on
a parametric 3D CAD/CAM system (Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire). We
are moving towards direct supply of simplified 3D models to
TraceParts, to simplify the flow of information and further
shorten the lead times for online availability, which are
already very fast. In addition the 3D model is also used to
generate CGI materials for commercial documents, before the
product has even been made or photographed. "
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In-house enthusiasm for this competitive advantage
The reason why a more efficient methodology is necessary
within the group is that the project is going to be
fast-tracked. Based on the success and positive
repercussions of integrating Telemecanique components
into the TraceParts library, Schneider Electric has
recently decided to extend the project to include all
its products, including those commercialized for the
Energy & Infrastructure sector (formerly Merlin Gerin
brand). Instead of a little more than 11,000 references
today, nearly 70,000 articles will eventually be
available.
So François Janvier has a double challenge to meet:
integrating existing catalogs and new products. He has
to deal with friendly pressure from the sales teams, who
realize that having their parts in the TraceParts
library is a competitive advantage, and insist that to
make their customers an offer the 3D models for the
relevant parts have got to be retrievable via the
TraceParts library!
Integration of the Schneider Electric catalog is shaping
up well. "Technical relations with TraceParts are
excellent" says François Janvier. "Not only are
our interlocutors complete masters of their CAD/CAM
technology and tool, which is not surprising, they also
understand our business and our needs. I'm even
surprised by their capacity to fully understand our
demands. We never have to repeat ourselves!"
For William Jeanson, the Schneider Electric group's
adhesion to the TraceParts component library project is
also due to the "trusting and transparent commercial
relations with interlocutors who prove their
responsiveness every day".
A commercial success
The first products were put online in 2003, enabling
design departments from Schneider Electric's customers
to make use of CAD/CAM component models in whatever
format they chose. In 2008, more than 30,000 models were
downloaded, and the statistics show that the downloading
customers perfectly reflect the markets targeted by the
modeled products. William Jeanson acknowledges this
growth is essentially due to TraceParts' communication
actions and the number of users throughout the world:
"We didn't communicate particularly about our presence,
except with our key accounts. Our first objective was to
provide them with a service, and today thanks to
feedback from our sales teams we know that service is
highly appreciated. But we also had the pleasant
surprise of discovering that at the same time our
presence on the TraceParts site was a fantastic sales
tool. Just another reason to hope that this partnership
will be long-lasting."
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