Mastering Efficiency in Inventor: Strategies and Savings

EDWARD R. ROSE: I want to thank you all for attending this recorded version of "Mastering Efficiency in Inventor, Strategies and Savings" for the Autodesk University 2024 conference. Sorry that you couldn't be out in San Diego with us, but hopefully, you'll get all the information out of this presentation that you need. And also, please refer to the PowerPoint as part of the recording.

We have the Autodesk safe harbor statement. This is in most of the presentations, I'm sure, if you've seen any from Autodesk. So I'll leave this on the screen for a moment, just to give you time to read through it if you haven't. You can also pause the presentation if you need more time to read it.

And with that we'll get going with the introduction of what we're going into. This presentation is courtesy of-- well, a lot of the information is courtesy of Unverferth Manufacturing. I have Mike and Steve Hilvers on the stage with me as well and helping me with this presentation. And I could not have done it without their help. So this, hopefully, will be as beneficial to you as it has been to me.

Our agenda is the introduction that we're going to do of each individual who's going to be part of the speaking process. Then we're going to go into, hey, where they are today-- so we're going to go to the end of this story, so to speak, to let what is possible. And then we're going to take you back to the beginning, where they were, and then how they got here today. And we'll have Q&A at the end of this presentation.

For those live, we try to make this as interactive as possible. We like people to learn. I'm passionate about learning new things. So if you have questions, raise your hand in the presentation. But for those of you who are watching this, unfortunately, you're not going to have that opportunity.

A little of my background. I have three sons. I live in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I have a granddaughter and a grandson. I've got my work history there. I started out as an applications engineer. For those of you who don't know Autodesk terminology, essentially, I was a tech doing training and demos.

I went into technical sales, so I got lobotomized. That's a bad joke, but it always-- I enjoy it. Went through several years of doing sales, resellers, merging with each other, and now I'm a client success manager for team D3, A Symetri Company. My job is primarily focused on training and customer relations, so I get to have all the fun of a tech, but I don't have to do-- and sales stuff, but I don't have to do any sales reports, so that's fine.

And on the stage I have here with me Steve Hilvers.

STEVE HILVERS: And hello, everyone, and thanks for inviting us, not only for today, but the past 30-ish years. Been a good ride. Been a fun ride. But as Ed mentioned, I'm Steve Hilvers. I'm with Unverferth Manufacturing, and been involved with 2D CAD-- or 2D to 2D CAD to make mechanical desktop and then to Vault and Inventor. And almost approaching 30-- probably 32 years, now, been in some type of Autodesk product.

And pretty much, I am design engineer by trade. And today, I do very little of that, designing anymore. Most of it's working on efficiencies, working with our sales, writing rules for our sales product configurator, and managing Vault and making, basically, our engineers and draftsmen and designers more efficient at the job they're supposed to be doing, and that's designing.

And a lot of you may have seen me or may not have seen me, but I've experienced with several AU classes or sessions over the years. And out of all that time, I am still a husband and a father of two.

EDWARD R. ROSE: Thanks. Thanks, Steve. The other gentleman I have up here on the stage with me is Mike Hilvers.

MIKE HILVERS: Yeah. So to answer your question, everybody out there, yeah, we are brothers. But pretty much like Steve, a lot of the same history. Been with the company going into my 29th year full time with a couple of years, doing the summer thing, and college breaks, semester breaks.

For most part of that time, I was design engineer. Also shared role of CAD manager with Steve. He focuses a lot on Vault, and I focus on the Inventor side of things and the actual deployments. Do about 50 seats of Inventor and another hundred or so seats of Vault. Kind of take care of the customizing and a little bit of teaching education.

And along the way, as our CAD has developed and evolved, we also developed and evolved standards to help keep all facilities on the same page. More recently, I've been in the design engineering supervisor role for the Ohio facilities. And then onto that, a husband and proudly a dad of three, and also on the side, a fifth generation farmer, which takes us back to the era of Abe Lincoln.

EDWARD R. ROSE: Excellent. Well, now, let's get into why we're here. One of the things-- and this presentation actually evolved a little bit. I started out-- I was just highly focused on standards because as my background of doing technical support for Autodesk products, most specifically Inventor, that, to me, was an unsung hero of how to get efficiency out of Inventor and out of your workflow.

And on here, I'll let Mike and Steve talk to some of the data points on this about-- because I don't do this for a living, but I learn a lot from end users about what works and what doesn't work. And Mike and Steve Unverferth has everything dialed in as best of anybody. But talk a little bit about some of the benefits of having a solid setup on your standards.

MIKE HILVERS: Yeah, I think the first three to four on the list that has here-- pretty self-explanatory. But you get down towards the end-- if you don't have standards and you're going to start implementing them, which I highly recommend, it's going to demand from some assistance from leadership. Ed's picture here, the cartoon, really exemplifies trying to generate standards. It's got to be a little bit give and take from everybody.

And there's going to be points where you need leadership to say, hey, this is what we got to do, and here's why we got to do it. And if you give folks a reason why we want to standardize, why we want the standard to do this, it makes the process a lot easier and definitely, listen-- and realize, also, that not everything can be standardized. Personnel are different. Roles are different. Machines are different. Factories are different.

So that's where-- as we've grown over the years, that's where we've taken the mindset that the drawing defines the parts. It sets the tolerances. What's our max and min we can allow in this part? And then we let it up to each division or each factory to decide how they're going to produce it. Like I mentioned, machines are different, and people are different. Processes are different.

And a good example is a tapped hole. A tapped hole-- I tried to standardize on a tap size, and we ended up abandoning it because every facility, everybody we asked, got a different answer. It's based on machine. It's based on the material, what your tools are that you have to utilize.

So that's where we define it. We want a 1/4 inch dash 20 thread. And that's the only requirement we make. We let it up to the manufacturing side of things to get that to what we want.

EDWARD R. ROSE: Excellent. So this slide here is-- I believe it's your Delphos, Ohio manufacturing facility, Steve?

STEVE HILVERS: Yeah, this is pretty typical of most of our production facilities. Probably typically is maybe five or six different cells or steps in building a product, the whole assembly line. So yeah, I mean, pretty much, it's-- what you see is what you get in all five facilities.

EDWARD R. ROSE: Awesome. So one of the key things that I learned about in this process of going through this with you is that Unverferth has Inventor and Vault Professional as the one source of truth. Inventor maintains the CAD model and all the metadata of the model itself, and Vault is the source of truth for the engineering change order and what's been released for the shop floor as far as released from engineering to be produced. I've got that correct, guys, right?

STEVE HILVERS: Yes

EDWARD R. ROSE: Yeah. So that being said, that's allowed Unverferth to do some incredibly amazing things. I'm going to let Steve talk a little bit about what they're doing. So I know some of these graphics are from earlier times as they were evolving through this, but what they're doing on the shop floor to improve communications throughout the plant.

STEVE HILVERS: Yeah. So we were-- I guess as Ed mentioned, Vault is our single source of truth. And it really doesn't matter whether it's Vault or a competitor or whatever, but our single source of truth is-- really starts with the model.

Way back when, we looked at bidirectional, so pushing items back to the model and the IDW and went bidirectional. Well, we found out that you never knew who actually won, so we eventually went to a single source of truth. And that single source of truth is-- the model feeds everything, all the way up from just the files at Vault. We use items in Vault, so it pushes that metadata-- and it just so happens to be iProperties-- from the model into the item. And then those items in Vault feed our ERP system items with the same data.

And as engineers, we only put the information that really specifies exactly what that takes to build that part. We don't push information that, as engineers, don't care about, like maybe some sales codes or who we allow this part to be sold to. So that's all handled in our ERP system. We don't handle any of that in the model because it would constantly be changing.

But once we determine that, it allowed us to basically push that data to everywhere. We now have the ability to basically view those-- not only 2D prints, but we're referring to the models. The guys on the production floor are actually pulling the 3D models up and viewing that information and looking-- primarily, to look at the models, and as well as get the metadata, like bill of materials, some of that information, right from the CAD model, and as well as specific properties of what that part's made out of, what the material is. Is it plastic or steel? They can easily identify it.

And most of the-- and really, we started with the Vault Mobile app. And once the, I guess, Forge Viewer-- or APS Viewer, now, I guess they call it-- became available in the Thick Client, we started really focusing on the Thin Client and letting that be the single source of truth.

And they can-- basically, what we did-- we took the Thin Client. Where we ended up today, we took the Thin Client and pretty much stripped the UI out of it. And we're using Vault API lookups. And what it does, and these-- and basically, the top right there, the red box window says Sightline Toolbox.

We basically built two buttons. And this one has a 3D button. Our ERP system has a drawing button, our DWG button, and a 3D button. So we stripped the UI out, and now it's just a single point and click. They don't have to reuse or figure out how to use a Thin Client. We took away all of that UI, and it's just a point and click. And it brings them right into the basically stripped-down version of the Thin Client, all using API.

And it's also looking at the item. And it's pulling the last release version. So if a model is going through on a change, production floor is not seeing that information because the API is basically pulling the last released version of that file-- of that item that was released. And that's what they're viewing.

And pretty much, this is all home brewed, done in house. And if you want to play that video, Ed, I think--

EDWARD R. ROSE: Oh, yeah. I'll come up to the video. This is pretty awesome as far as what they can do on the shop floor. This impressed me to no--

STEVE HILVERS: So basically, what we did here, we took the Thin Client. And some plants are still using mobile apps to limit it, but this is basically a 65-inch touch screen TV. And they're using applications they're already familiar with. The only thing we added was a 2D and 3D button.

They hit that button. That brings them-- it basically logs them into the Thin Client. And there's really no UI here. It just brings right into the view of the model. And that's because that's all they care about. They don't want-- care about items or change orders or where the file is at. They just want to view the file. So we took that using the API and just made it really simple.

And a lot of that's just touch, pick, touch, pick a part, identifies-- you can identify assemblies, welds. It just has really revolutionized our people on how they-- I mean, they don't really rely on 2D prints anymore.

EDWARD R. ROSE: Yeah, this next video that I'm going to pull up is-- and both you and Mike can speak to it because it covers some of the Vault interface. And also, I know that it goes into some of the other items that you guys will show, like the welds. And you can talk to that as well.

STEVE HILVERS: So, basically, this is-- oh, this is coming from our ERP system now. And there's basically a drawing-- DWG button that's a 2D print as well as a 3D. Then the tool box is kind of another application. But it's the same logic. It's just two different ways of getting there based on who the user is. But basically, they can view the 2D print. And if you want a 3D model, it actually opens up another tab or multiple tabs, so.

And as it goes in a 3D model here, you basically see-- and it opens another tab, so you can actually flip between the IDW and the IM, rotate it around, a lot of-- I mean, the mobile phone has revolutionized everything. Majority of our people on the floor know how to use a cell phone, and zooming in and zooming out on Photos-- it's basically-- it's very similar logic and interface.

But it gives us the ability to zoom in on areas that we've never-- I mean, to identify or do what you want to on a 2D print would take hours. They can just do it, and they get exactly what they need instantly. And they don't have to rely on engineers coming down to the floor and-- to interpret how something goes together. They can see it now. And in this case, it just highlighted a weldment. And it actually goes in and shows the welds, how something gets welded.

EDWARD R. ROSE: Yeah, that's one of the things that impressed me, was the mention-- how you've improved communication between the different shifts and engineering on accuracy of creating welds and stuff, eliminating questions between the shop floor and engineering.

MIKE HILVERS: Yeah, exactly, Ed. And welds is a great example of this. And one of your bullet points on one of the slides was you're empowering the employees. So you take a weld-- I think everybody that has welding going on in their facility-- they can relate to the fact that you can take a 2D print, you can put a weld symbol on it, and you can take five different people, and potentially get five different interpretations of that weld symbol, especially on more complex items.

So you get an argument between first shift welds it their way. Second shift welds it their way. First shift comes back and says, hey, second shift didn't weld theirs right.

So we go through that. And we, as the engineer-- we got to spend time deciphering that weld symbol, too. Even if it was our own that was done a couple years ago, we don't remember all the intent.

So this is where the viewer really takes care of that because they can see exactly what needs welded, where it needs welded. And like I said, it takes the argument out of it. So it helps improve the communication between the different shifts. And it gets a lot of-- it gets rid of a lot of unproductive tasks and a lot of wasted time and trying to decipher what really needs to be done. And ultimately, it sends a consistent product out the shop door. So we gain efficiency, and we gain consistency.

And some of the other things it does for you is-- you get real-time visibility of what the model is, what the drawing is. If it goes through, say, a job order is already cut and it's already out on the floor, but we run a change notice and don't catch that there's a job out there-- when they go to view this, they're going to see the new parts. And it may raise a flag that says, hey, this isn't matching. The rev level isn't matching, or these parts aren't matching that 2D print. And at the best case, they are getting the latest and greatest instead of an old version.

EDWARD R. ROSE: So this stuff all has helped you guys improve your productivity with your production out the door. And it also eliminates-- as I remember one of the stories you used to tell me of ways that used to be done on the shop floor, hey, go get Jim, who knew how to do this. Bring him over here and have him teach the new guy.

You've eliminated that and given everybody the ability to basically run with the product and be able to build it, so you've taken the intellectual capital of the company and the engineering department and made it available to everybody who needs to use it within the company. And I know as we get later in the slides, we'll talk about how you guys are doing this across multiple plants as well.

So with this, knowing where you're at, let's jump into where you were. Mike, there's some good images here of Unverferth. So give us a little overview of Unverferth themselves.

MIKE HILVERS: Yeah. So I guess without Unverferth, none of us would be here talking, so-- in terms of Steve, Ed, and myself. We're a 75-year-old, family-owned company, still family owned. Actually, the headquarters is just down the road, where it started in an old chicken coop.

But our founder-- he served in the war voluntarily, went into the draft, and served the war. He survived the war. His passion and entrepreneurship-- that survived as well. And things have progressed from there.

And we design, make, sell our own farm equipment. We sell through a dealer network. And we're into our third and fourth generation now running the company. And things are still looking very, very bright. And just a lot of good family values and open minds that let us do what we can do to be more efficient.

EDWARD R. ROSE: Awesome. So where-- and I know that you were started with AutoCAD in around 1990. I met Mike and Steve in about 1994. The way I met Mike and Steve-- the engineering manager at the time was Dave Smith. And he was looking at taking Unverferth to 3D with Mechanical Desktop. If anybody out there in the crowd knows Mechanical Desktop, then you're as old as I am or older.

Anyway, I told-- I had a process that I would try to get people from 2D to 3D. And that was-- I told Dave-- I go, find your two biggest rock stars. So apparently, Mike and Steve are rock stars.

And I said, take them. Put them through the essentials course on Mechanical Desktop. Let them have six months of lighter workloads so they can figure out what standards and templates and get that all set up for your company. And then cut them loose for a job and see if it gives you the benefits that I tell you it will get.

This isn't an overnight thing, going from 2D to 3D, going to what they've done is not an overnight thing. It's a long process. And I go, I don't want to shut down your production. Take two guys. Let them learn. Then roll two more in. And build yourself up into this.

They did that. And I never forgot the example that-- Steve came to me after they'd done their first project, which was a prototype gravity bed or grain wagon. And he told me that they cut half the production time out of the project by doing it that way.

And they have gone on to do even greater things. We'll talk about one of their examples later on in a slide. But they went to Inventor, then to Vault, and they were one of the earliest adopters of Vault. In fact, any of you out there who are using Vault can probably thank Mike and Steve for some of the better features that are in there because they're very instrumental in getting Vault to where it is today.

So back to the beginning, Steve, I love this three-ring binder. And anybody who's been in the industry for a while for engineering change orders can probably sympathize with this. But tell us how the process used to be and how much this has helped.

STEVE HILVERS: Yeah. So way back when, pretty much, the 2D print was gospel, and that drove everything. And once we got to Vault and Inventor, we kind of decided that-- let's make the model-- let's embed all the information in the model and let that drive everything up. Let that be the single source of truth.

And way back when, even when we'd just got into Vault, we relied heavily on paper. So just-- I mean, I don't know. That's probably two reams of paper there. But it would take weeks to build a change order like that. And I would say, this might be excessive, but half that size was normal.

So every drawing or 2D print that went through went into a binder. And then that binder got passed around the facility. And that worked. It wasn't ideal. You had to sometimes go find where that book went, who had it, who didn't-- just-- it was just-- a review took weeks versus days.

Once we went to Vault and found out that items-- and there was change orders that were basically being-- you could do change orders in Vault, we started going down that path. And we basically eliminated that binder. And in Vault, change orders build themselves.

And pretty much we set the standard that-- let's let-- we have the software, the capabilities there. Let's do that. And from an efficiency standpoint, I mean, it's really changed the way our users work 20 years ago. They're not a prisoner of their own data or paperwork. Now they just produce it. The change orders in Vault build themselves. And they're not managing paper anymore. They're really managing digital files.

And as for review process, with this book and multi facilities, wouldn't even be possible today, with five facilities. Now we can review, and everything's digital. We can have multiple plants reviewing, multiple people in multiple plants, so we know where that change order is at any given time. And I mean, we're talking a week versus weeks or months to do something like the way we used to do it.

EDWARD R. ROSE: Yeah, excellent. And I would suggest that everyone check out the recorded sessions from AU 2014, because Steve did a session on exactly this and how much it saved the company. If any of you are reading the PDF, you'll have seen the numbers from that presentation.

But it was a significant amount of annual savings that they've gotten from going-- and these were just hard numbers. Hey, it saved us this much physical time. It saved us this much paper. Mike had-- or Steve had the breakdown exactly. And I was just floored by how much savings there was involved in this.

Plus, again, if you have that binder and you've got a plant in another state-- yeah, you all can see the problem that that would accrue and how much time savings you can get around that as well.

So that being said, about them having multiple plants, here are some images of four of the five facilities. The Kalida facility-- I've been there multiple times. I've been to the Shellrock's facility a couple of times. Delphos, I've been to once. Lexington, Nebraska is your newest facility. And maybe I'll get out there sometime and see that one. But you're able to communicate effectively across all of these plants with the layout that you've gotten.

And you have grown over the years. When I first met Mike and Steve, the only two plants that they had were the Kalida facility for engineering and the Delphos, Ohio facility for engineering. So the company's been growing by leaps and bounds. And if you look at that picture, when I first met Mike and Steve, that Kalida facility was half that size. That facility has grown quite rapidly.

But part of what we want to talk about, too, is standards. I'm going to let Mike-- because templates and standards, you don't have to go crazy with. I'm going to let Mike talk about the templates and standards they built to help them get to where they are.

MIKE HILVERS: Yep. So there's two key parts to standardizing, as far as Inventor. One of them is all the styles. A lot of the styles are part of the IDW, and there's a lot of good classes and a lot of good documentation on how to do up good styles.

But the other half of that is the templates. So we try to keep our templates to a minimum for two reasons. One is as the CAD manager role, that's just less I have to maintain. But on the other side of that is the person creating the files-- they've only-- they've got fewer options of templates to pick, so the less of a chance of picking the wrong template.

And one other thing is we run one IPJ across the company, so everything goes into one Vault, one IPJ file. Again, we're not jumping around and people getting in the wrong place.

But we have four IPTs, and we have a standard one, which is probably 90%, 95% of the parts. Because a lot of-- when you design some, you start designing something from the ground up, you don't know if you're going to end up with a sheet metal part or it's an IN, going to be a weldment. You really don't know where it's going to end up. So majority of the time, we'll start with a standard part.

And then we have a second template, which we call shapes. And essentially, what that is-- it has a cross section or an extrusion for all the different steel profiles. So there's square tube, rectangular tube, angle iron, round, round rod, I beams, H beams. We have those in there. So they're all in there, but they're suppressed.

And so what a guy does is unsuppress the profile that they want. And they can edit, say, a rectangular tubing. You edit the height, the width, and the wall thickness and your extrusion length, and now they have a tube. So we don't have them creating a tube, that cross-sectional profile every time. We have it all in there.

And then we get to IMs. We really only have two IMs. We have the standard, and then we have a weldment. And really, the only difference between a weldment and a standard IM is that a weldment has the weld material preselected, which, for us, most part is mild steel.

But other than that, it's the standard template. But again, probably 90%, 95% of the times someone's starting a new file, they're starting it as a standard part. Because once you go to the weldment environment, you can't back out of it. So we tend to let people-- or recommend people start with the standard IM. And if it's going to become a weldment, then you convert it at that time.

And then comes the IDWs. We do have three different IDWs. And the primary reason for that is the different groups that are creating drawings. Again, we have the standard, which is majority of our production parts. And the real difference between all of these, really, is the tolerancing, the default tolerancing, the title block, primarily.

And so we have one for the standard parts. We have one for the tooling, which they want to run three-place decimals all the time. And then we have a wheel division or a wheel portion to our Ohio design group. And they're creating custom wheels. And that's wheels that go on tractors, primarily. And there are a lot of them that are the same or similar. Again, we run decimals on that because pretty much all that's running across CNC machines. So that's the third one in terms of IDWs.

But like I said, we try to keep it straight, streamlined, straight to the point. If you don't know what you need, start with standard.

EDWARD R. ROSE: Excellent. So not only do they have templates and standards, but there are some add-ons that are used. I know Steve is going to be talking about this. Because one of the-- iProp Wizard is a third-party application that's on the Autodesk App Store for Inventor, if you check out the App Store for all the different Autodesk products.

But it's something that they've used for years because in the case of their model, it's got all the metadata, and consistency is important with that. So, Steve, can you talk about how iProperty Wizard has helped you guys in that front.

STEVE HILVERS: So yeah, it really-- I mean, the iProps in the Inventor model is where everything starts. And getting the data in there is fairly easy, but guiding the users to know what data they have to put in there and what values we require-- you can do this-- basically, you could use the iProps-- just regular iProps right out of Inventor. The problem is, you've got 100 or so iProps, and you can create custom iProperties. And you really have no direction to say, hey, we need these five. We don't need these. And it's kind of all over.

When we first started with Inventor, which was back around '03-ish, iLogic was not available. The only thing we really had was-- we came across was this iProps Wizard. So it was almost there from the day one. It's basically a third-party application from C Cubed, I think, is the website.

But we do pay for it per user, and it's annual. But it allows us to basically customize or create a custom window. And it tells them exactly what properties they need. There's pull downs, so they can do a drop down. And it gives them five options. You got to pick one of these five. So anything you see on the left image there with an asterisk-- that's required. And some of them have drop downs. Some of them, like Description, you can put whatever you want to in there.

But that was really the only tool we had. And if you fill this information out, that feeds out all the way up to the items in the ERP system. So it was basically directing-- and most engineers, I would say, and designers-- they need structure, direction, or workflow, how to get where they need to go. And this was not a nice thing to have. It was a necessary thing for us to have.

So this is one option. Another option would be to use iLogic. ILogic is available. And this screenshot here is something I've been working on over the last few years, not knowing, since iProps Wizard is a third-party application, if, for some reason, they would quit updating that to go to the next version, we needed something in our back pocket going forward.

So I would say 95% of this is done. We haven't implemented it yet, just because we don't want to disrupt everybody's world. But we do have that in the back pocket.

The other option is Data Standard. And again, iLogic, Data Standard-- they're both in the product, come along with the-- at least the Data Standards comes, I believe, is Vault Professional, where iLogic comes right with Inventor. The only thing you have to be-- ahve a little bit of a programming-- there is code involved.

So whereas iProps wizard-- it's just customizing, you don't need to have any logic or code-writing abilities or skills, whereas iLogic and Data Standard, you kind of do. So I've played with all of them. The Data Standard-- I felt iLogic and iProps Wizard offered us the most, and that's the direction we started focusing on, going forward.

But the nice thing about all the standards-- once you get this all standard and product lines, just because a product line is made in our Kalida facility today, doesn't mean it's always going to be built here. So by making standards and getting everything common or unique amongst all the files, we can easily push out-- this out to our Shellrock or Delphos or Lexington facilities. And it's just-- they're used to it. They know exactly what's coming down. So that's really what standards are all about, and getting one common foundation for everything.

EDWARD R. ROSE: Awesome. So that means because of tools like this, the CAD model is your source of truth. It has all the information in there. One of the things I thought about was, considering what a terrible typist I am, I know you have fields in there where it's pull-down lists, so it's-- you don't have typos in any of those items like I have in all my data sets. [LAUGHS]

So that being the fact, that you now have the CAD model as your primary source of truth, what's been released from engineering is now the Vault Professional side of things, is the source of truth there. Steve, do you want to talk a little bit about how Vault Professional is locking down everything for everybody and also granting access to everybody and giving you reuse of data across your facilities?

STEVE HILVERS: Yeah. So basically, I mean, you just mentioned it. Reuse of data is really everything. All five of our facilities make farm equipment or ag equipment implements. And we're all good at certain things, really good at others, and other plants are just good, but boy, they want to reuse part or-- if not all of something from another facility.

Being we have one, basically, database for Vault, we're sharing that data across all of our facilities with one single file store, one database. So I can be sitting here in Kalida or Shellrock or Delphos or Lexington, and I can move around facilities. And it's just like I'm there.

So we share that data. We reuse the data constantly. And then it also-- the copy design is really-- it allows us to easily flip or create a new design. It's really close to this design, but I just want to tweak this little thing. So I mean, it really automatically creates these new structures and build materials and creates the IDW automatically. And it's really revolutionized and turned our throughput around with this copy design utility. And again, I believe that's in Vault Professional that allows us to do that.

EDWARD R. ROSE: Excellent. Well, now we're almost done with the presentation, but I've got a little bit further to go because this has gotten us to where they-- back around to where they are today, where they're being wildly successful with production, shrinking production times. The shop floor is able to be empowered to answer questions they've got. It's eliminated a lot of wasted workflows between engineering and manufacturing. It's just made you guys a well-oiled machine.

But we all know everything-- once it gets to a certain point, you're going to continue to improve. And so Mike, talk a little bit about-- I know that it says on this slide paperless manufacturing was once a dream, and you're now there, but talk a little bit about some of the other things that you guys are looking to do as we go forward.

MIKE HILVERS: Yeah. It's like you said. Quite a few years ago, and I'm not even going to pick a year, but it's going to be more than 10 years ago that Autodesk said, there's going to be a day where it's going to be paperless world. And they finally brought-- got the tools brought forward where it is reality.

And I guess kind of got to do a little bit of a thanks to the Autodesk team, the Inventor team, the Vault team, who-- we've given them a lot of input over the years. And then they respond with-- and that's how we got to the viewers that we got today. But I guess we also got to thank Ed for lighting a fire way back in the 3D days.

But now, where do we go from here? And I think everybody that ever created a 2D print really don't like doing it. It's a huge-- it takes a tremendous amount of time, although there's a lot of efficiency of Inventor to help you do that now. But it takes a tremendous amount of time.

And that could be time that we could be designing other products. And with the advent of model-based definition, where you can put all your annotations on the model now, and your CNC machines can read those models and direct-- it really gives us the vision now to get rid of 2D prints.

And I think it's realistic in our careers yet to see that. And really, really could revolutionize the speed in which we could develop new products and new designs.

But to take that one step further, we have a previous version. We have a current version. And writing change notices, really, is a slow and cumbersome task, too. Although we've streamlined it, it still takes a lot of time. And really, what is a change notice? One, it's for history, but number two, it's to notify people of change.

Well, with all the talk of AI, to me, the next, obvious step is to let AI write this change order and to inform people of the changes. So you got model A. You've a rev A. You got rev B. It can say, hey, this hole moved from whatever it is, 1 inch off the edge to 2 inches off the edge. So it could highlight the changes and tell you the differential. Or the whole size was 9/32, and now it's going to go to 9/16. Let AI generate that change notice control.

And like I said, I think that really could elevate us to the next level. And hopefully, we got a few Autodeskers here that hear me preaching here. But I really think, and I'm excited, that that could happen.

EDWARD R. ROSE: Excellent. Well, thank you, guys. I really appreciate this. Right now, we would normally-- and at the AU session, in the live, we'll be going to our Q&A for everyone. But with that, if you want to connect with any of us, those of you who are watching this presentation, the QR codes on the screen are the LinkedIn profiles for each one of us, so you can reach out to us on LinkedIn.

I will start out by saying I'm not great at watching my LinkedIn, so I will apologize. Please forgive me if I don't respond quickly. But if you reach out to me there, I will respond in a recent-- or a good amount of time.

Again, I want to thank Steve and Mike for taking the time to help me. This has been a fun learning experience with them. Also, check out the Power-- or the PDF that goes along with this. There's a lot of additional information in there that we didn't have time to get to in these slides.

For those of you at AU live session, Symetri, Team D3-- we have a booth in the booth area or in the showroom area. And if you would want to come and visit us or-- that's a QR code to our site so you can take a look at us there.

And with that, I want to thank everyone, and have a wonderful rest of your day.