Howden’s Transition to Fusion Lifecyle

James Howden 1832-1913

Since the 1850s, Howden has been designing and manufacturing heavy equipment for industry. Though the company’s founder, James Howden, first imagined his firm supplying products for the ship building industry, through acquisitions the company has entered other markets, including the air and gas compressor game.

While compressors might seem like fairly straightforward pieces of technology on their face, they’re actually surprisingly complex machines. In fact, depending on what industry a company is serving, compressors can be one-of-a-kind items that require precision engineering. That’s especially true for the power, mining, oil and gas, and many other industries.

Building Specialized Compressor Packages

Jon Douglas, a project manager at Howden, helps run a 250-person team spread across the United Kingdom. Douglas’ group, the Howden Compressor Division (HCO), engineers everything from small root compressors right up to very large and complex rotary screw compressor and turbo compressor packages. What’s more, the HCO also designs and manufactures bareshaft compressors used in its larger compressor packages.

An example of a complex compressor package. (Image courtesy of Howden.)

Given that the HCO team consists of only 250 people distributed across three separate offices, you can imagine that engineering an application-specific compressor can be a daunting task. Douglas was quick to affirm that notion, “We’re frequently dealing in the oil and gas market, and this means we work with some of the most demanding customers in the world.” Douglas continued, “Each of these customers has its own set of specifications, which we must follow. Sometimes this can amount to over 250 specifications, so just imagine trying to understand and control this amount of information coming into our business.”

On a typical compressor job, Douglas’ team has to comply with a mixed bag of pressure requirements, control systems and software, exacting dimensions, noise requirements and sometimes even the machine’s color. Needless to say, managing the myriad change orders and regulations that envelop a compressor project can be daunting.

To add to his team’s difficulties, Douglas noted that many of the fact-finding operations and cross-departmental communication processes were onerous and further complicated the product design process. Finally, the HCO team also found itself relying on a heavily coded Microsoft Access database that was beginning to sag under the pressure of customer demands and regulatory documentation.

Douglas knew that it was time for a change, and he began looking for a cloud-based product lifecycle management (PLM) system to tighten up his product design workflow.

How PLM at HCO worked before Fusion Lifecycle was implemented. (Image courtesy of Howden.)

Implementing Autodesk Fusion Lifecycle

Shortly after beginning his search, Douglas discovered Autodesk Fusion Lifecycle, a cloud-based PLM system linked to the Fusion 360 product design suite. Immediately, Douglas realized that Fusion Lifecycle could be the answer to his product development problems.

According to the HCO lead, Fusion Lifecycle was an attractive option for a number of reasons, including the fact that the HCO wouldn’t have to rely on consultants to modify and update its PLM operation, it could be configured in short order and it was in the cloud so that all three of his offices could be easily looped into the system.

The flexibility of Fusion Lifecycle convinced the HCO team that it was the correct PLM tool. (Image courtesy of Howden.)

But before the HCO team would take a plunge into the Lifecycle deeps, Douglas visited another company that had already implemented the system and was convinced that Fusion Lifecycle was the way to go.

What convinced him?

Douglas was impressed by Lifecycle’s flexibility. In particular, Douglas loved how easy it was going to be to transfer his old process to Fusion Lifecycle where the entire PLM processes could be easily digested and understood by everyone on the team.

After all of the evidence was before him, Douglas decided to pull the trigger and, at the beginning of 2015, the HCO team kicked off its PLM implementation project with Autodesk and had the goal of being completely self-sufficient within a year.

The Results of a Lifecycle Switch

Over the following 12 months, Howden’s development team worked hand in hand with Autodesk experts to develop a PLM system that fit the scope of the HCO team’s operation. Once the system was fully implemented, the HCO team realized that it now had access to the information and metrics that it couldn’t get its hands on before, it introduced an improved document control process, it slashed its reliance on email (a notorious communication bottleneck), and made its operation more transparent to all relevant parties.

But still, there were a few hiccups along the way to having a smooth PLM process.

Fortunately, because of the Fusion 360 system’s flexibility, the problem was also a big part of the solution.

When Lifecycle was deployed at HCO, engineers in different departments began using inconsistent workflows. Because of this lack of procedure standardization, the HCO team quickly began losing control of its development process. As Douglas put it, “A BAD PROCESS IS STILL A BAD PROCESS IN FUSION LIFECYCLE.”

In order to correct this, the HCO team went back to the basics and began formalizing its PLM workflow by implementing a standard workflow template called “Workspace Management.”

Howden's improved Lifecycle Workspace: clean, simple and easy to use. (Image courtesy of Howden.)

Because of Fusion Lifecycle’s flexibility, this switch wasn’t a monumental task.

With this new template in place, the interactions between the different groups within the HCO became organized. Anyone on the team could communicate with another teammate, and if the scope of a project needed to be expanded, it could be done in an organized and way.

Since implementing Fusion Lifecycle, HCO has seen a dramatic improvement in the transparency of its PLM process. Given the complexity of the products it’s creating, that’s no small feat.