Marathon Electric has a need for designing motors based on customer specifications, and managing the knowledge and rules that enable this customization is very complex. Marathon wanted a tool that could be used by their application engineers to speed up the process of configuring custom motors, reducing the cycle time for generating sales proposals and generating bills of material.
The Apprentice Product Modeler software uses Visio to help Marathon visualize their rules. Information such as how to select parts based on the application needs, how to select auxiliary parts based on other components in the design and how parts fit together is captured using a drag-and-drop Visio interface. The Product Modeler then learns these rules and deploys them via the Product Apprentice.
Marathon has written its own Visual Basic interface around the Product Apprentice to deploy the application internally.
Marathon has a custom-built configuration system that provides fast proposal turnaround and higher close rates. The system has greater accuracy than a manual approach, yielding fewer design changes and more profitable projects. The configuration tool works with their PDM (Product Data Management) system.
