Black Diamond Turns Passion into Product

Black Diamond Equipment Ltd. (www.blackdiamondequipment.
com), an employee-owned manufacturer of climbing and skiing equipment, operates on three continents and sells its products in more than 20 countries. One of the company's defining characteristics -- and a key strategic asset -- is the fact that its employees are passionate climbers and skiers themselves. They know what makes a great product versus a good one.

The ability to capture all the nuances of consumer requirements (along with its employees' ideas and expertise) has been critical to growing this business.

"We must make sure that we can acquire the information about what our customers want, put it in a place where a skilled and energetic design team, manufacturing engineering team and production and sales teams can access it, and then use it in a meaningful way to get great products to our customers," says Joshua Dees, Black Diamond's vice president for MIS.

Black Diamond implemented the Teamcenter product lifecycle management solution from Siemens PLM Software (www.siemens.com). The company is using the solution's enterprise knowledge management, project management and collaboration functionality to ensure continued innovation and future growth.


Capturing Creativity

In the past, Black Diamond used a variety of approaches to manage projects and communicate product information. "The problem was you never knew where to find data," says Dave Mellon, vice president for products at Black Diamond.

"And when we tried to share information across the organization, with manufacturing engineers and further out through production, for example, it became very difficult to manage, particularly because design data changes fairly rapidly in a progressive product line like ours," adds Dees.

"We are a very open and creative company," adds Ben Walker, director of R&D at Black Diamond. "But that isn't necessarily conducive to proper file management."

Teamcenter now supports Black Diamond's innovation culture by providing the ability to bring many people together in the design of its products.

"Employees, friends, and professional climbers and skiers together give us a multitude of perspectives," according to Dees.


The Collaborative Process

Black Diamond uses another Siemens PLM solution, the NX digital product development system, in the design of its products. It uses other CAD and CAM programs for manufacturing engineering. Teamcenter bridges the gap across diverse applications.

By storing all product information in one place, Black Diamond now has the assurance that members of product teams are working with valid data, whether they're in the company's offices in Switzerland, North America or China.

According to Brendan Perkins, a design engineer at Black Diamond, "We're saving a lot of the time we spent -- a half hour to an hour trying to download files and maybe the connection is really slow from China this morning or in the evening -- as opposed to Teamcenter just handling those transfers."

 "And when we move into production, we're building exactly what we intended," adds Dees. "That not only allows us to deliver to the customer the product we promised, it also allows our manufacturing team to operate more efficiently because they have built tooling around a certain design."

The Web-based solution is also used to make critical project management information accessible to all members of product teams.

"Whether it's a Utah employee working from home or one of our colleagues overseas, they are able to track and update a project," says Dees.


The Total Package

In addition to providing the platform for innovation and collaboration, Teamcenter is expected to reduce Black Diamond's IT costs by reducing the number of systems that the IT staff must maintain. "Implementing Teamcenter on Microsoft SQL Server brings into our organization another system, but it's a system with the back end that we already know how to manage," explains Dees.

Dees would like to see as broad an implementation as possible at Black Diamond. "I'd like to see Teamcenter and the entire PLM vision end to end, from forecasting for particular product lines all the way to our warranty and returns department," he says. He also sees benefit in integrating the solution with the company's ERP system. 

For now, though, Black Diamond is already seeing a competitive advantage. "There are a lot of companies in our industry that are good competitors," says Walker. "But as we continue to grow and implement tools like Teamcenter and NX, they give us a competitive advantage over other companies because we're working in a way that's much more efficient. We're actually empowered to design products that truly lead in our market."