Mold-Masters Drawing Manager Portal

The Client 

Established in 1963 in Toronto, Canada, Mold-Masters in an engineering firm who are global leaders in the Plastics industry. They provide services to customers across 100 countries and have over 2,100 employees world-wide. Pioneers in the field, they continue to expand and innovate their product offerings according to cutting edge industry standards and innovative manufacturing techniques. 

The Challenge 

A critical aspect of a successful sales order delivery to a customer is the approval of engineering drawings. Mold-Masters had put in place a process to share and track the status of the drawings with their customers, but it included sending the engineering ‘packages’ via email as attachments and manual steps to update their ERP system to keep current status information updated. There were several challenges with this process however, which included constraints due to email attachment file sizes and tracking of different drawing versions sent across to the customer in different email threads. Approvals had to be manually tracked and updated accordingly by the technical sales representatives and design staff. 

The Solution 

A new solution was envisioned to address these challenges in the form of a Drawing Manager Portal, using a combination of Envision IT’s Extranet User Manager and Data Room with a SharePoint Online Portal. Engineering packages are automatically uploaded and shared with customers from SAP in a secure manner and automated workflows handle the approval process. Integrations back to SAP also automate the tracking and status updates to SAP in real time, such that management, technical sales representatives and designers have that information available at any time. 

The automation includes many features to facilitate the approval process including: 

• Automated generation of sales order packages from SAP
• An ability to configure whether technical sales engineers approve the drawings 
• Ability to designate contact information for customers and internal design and sales staff for each sales order. 
• Ability to upload updates and kick off a separate approval process 
• Reminders to technical sales engineers and customers when a certain time has elapsed after workflow notifications have been delivered 
• Ability for customers to approve either through the Drawing Manager Portal 
• Ability for customers to respond with requests for changes and to provide feedback and documents back to the engineering team 
• Automated status updates to SAP according to the approval workflow state(s). 
• Portal support and email templates in 6 different languages  

Results 

Initial pilots and demo sessions with various Mold-Masters international groups have generated excellent feedback and excitement about the upcoming launch of the system. Management, technical sales staff and designers are looking forward to the convenience and efficiency afforded by the new solution and plans are in full swing to being working with customers using the Drawing Manager Portal.