Manufacturing Voices: Stephan Britz, Director of Engineering, Sumitomo Machinery Corporation of America

Sponsored by CADDi. In this VOICES interview, Design World spoke with Stephan Britz, Director of Engineering at Sumitomo Machinery Corporation of America, about turning six decades of design data into actionable intelligence with the help of CADDi, enabling engineers to locate relevant designs in minutes, apply prior work and existing designs to new orders, and shorten delivery timelines.

Design World: Let’s start off with a little bit about yourself and your role at Sumitomo Drive Technologies.

Stephan Britz: Sure. I’m the Director of Engineering at Sumitomo Machinery Corporation of America. We’re the U.S. subsidiary of Sumitomo’s power transmission business in Japan and operate under the Sumitomo Drive Technologies brand. We’re based in Chesapeake, Virginia, and serve as the Western Hemisphere headquarters, supporting facilities from Canada to Latin America. We also have engineering teams in Glendale Heights, Illinois; Verona, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley; and Lufkin, Texas, where our aftermarket facility is located. In the Western Hemisphere we have 3 manufacturer headquarters and 13 assembly facilities.

I’m responsible for the U.S. Operations Engineering division, which includes front-end engineering and application engineering for selections, pricing, order processing and other technical administration. Our team also handles design engineering, including drawings, bills of materials, technical information, product IDs and manufacturing drawings. In addition, we support research and development, as well as aftermarket engineering for customer repairs, service needs and other technical support. That’s engineering in a nutshell.

Sumitomo produces engineered-to-order drive systems for industrial applications with strict performance and delivery requirements. How does your engineering team support order-specific design, validation and release? Does access to prior drawings or manufacturing records affect your ability to meet those requirements?

We manufacture industrial gearboxes, motors and power transmission equipment. One challenge with our data is that much of our growth has come through acquisitions. As Sumitomo expands into new industries or product areas, we often bring in companies with their own databases, part-number formats, pricing systems and drawing systems.

Over time, that has created a complex data environment with information spread across multiple systems.

Our drawings are stored across Lotus Notes, Inventor Vault and SharePoint, while our ERP, MRP and order-processing workflows rely on several connected platforms, including Salesforce. Engineers often spend significant time moving between these systems to process, verify and connect information.

When an engineer receives an order, they need to determine whether we have sold a similar product before and whether components from a previous order can be reused. Before CADDi, that required familiarity with the ERP system, Lotus Notes, SharePoint, Vault and 3D design software, along with the ability to move between those systems to validate components. CADDi has helped bring that information together in one place.

You’ve accumulated roughly 60,000 engineering drawings and documents across six decades, spread across multiple systems and formats. Before implementing CADDi, how did engineers access this information, and where were the biggest bottlenecks in their day-to-day design and research work?

Over decades of growth, broader engineering responsibilities and continued investment, we built a substantial library of prior designs, revision history, documentation and application knowledge. The challenge was that this information was spread across many systems, making it time-consuming to search and difficult to use efficiently. That need to reduce search time is what led us to CADDi.

Before CADDi, our engineering documents and drawings were stored primarily in Lotus Notes and Vault. Both systems functioned largely as document lists, so engineers had to search by numbers and file names rather than visually browsing drawings or components.

An engineer would typically start in the ERP system to find bill-of-material information, then cross-reference that part number in Lotus Notes or Vault. From there, they had to locate and open the related drawing just to understand what the component was — for example, whether it was a shaft, bearing or another part.

That process required significant data mining. Engineers had to work through long lists of part numbers, search separate systems and manually connect the pieces. Finding the right information was often tedious, time-consuming and more complicated than it needed to be.

At the point of decision, what did the system need to do with your data, and what showed it was ready to deploy out of the box?

The most powerful change was bringing drawings from multiple databases into one centralized location, creating a single, accessible repository of engineering data.

That became CADDi’s first major advantage for us: one database and one source of truth. Instead of working through lists of numbers, engineers can now visually review drawings and documents, read them directly, and compare information side by side much faster than they could in our previous systems.

During implementation and early use, what indicators confirmed the system was meeting your selection criteria? What gave you confidence it would continue to perform beyond initial deployment?

Within the first few weeks, as we began uploading data and connecting it to ERP drawings, we could already see the impact. Tasks that once took half a day — four hours or more — could now be completed in minutes when searching for similar information.

We have many long-tenured employees who know our systems extremely well, so we used a simple internal test. A new employee would search for a component in CADDi, while an experienced employee used the traditional systems and processes they knew best. Across multiple tests, the new employee consistently found the right information faster. In some cases, the experienced employees said they would not have found certain information at all resulting in the creation of a new part or product.

We studied our initial deployment with CADDi’s team and found that a drawing research process that had once been difficult had become much more seamless. Our senior design checker reported a 90% reduction in the time required to find data, making it possible to locate critical information in minutes instead of hours. That created significant time savings and freed engineers to focus on higher-value work.

The key takeaway was that fast access to a broader range of information gives engineers better options. Instead of simply finding data, they can evaluate multiple drawings or references and choose the best path forward.

Engineering teams often rely on exact part numbers or prior knowledge to locate designs. How has the ability to search your historical archive using shape and feature similarity changed how Sumitomo’s engineers find and evaluate existing designs? How did that affect decisions around reuse versus new design?

The similarity search feature is one of the capabilities we value most, and we are still finding new ways to use it. In the past, nearly every search depended on a part number in a list. It was difficult to picture what a part looked like, let alone find a similar component. Because the part numbers did not always have a logical relationship to one another, two nearly identical shafts could exist in the system without an engineer being able to locate both.

With CADDi, engineers can visually review drawings as they move through the archive. The similarity feature adds another layer of value. After locating one component, we can search for similar parts and quickly identify closely matched drawings — sometimes 10 or 20 options. That gives engineers enough context to compare references and decide which design is the best starting point.

Beyond finding similar past orders, CADDi helps uncover enough relevant references that engineers can choose a design requiring less modification before moving forward.

That capability has helped us save weeks of design work and significantly reduce customer lead times. More importantly, the time engineers previously spent searching for information can now be redirected toward actual engineering work, such as evaluating options, refining designs and solving customer-specific application challenges.

Sumitomo Drive Technologies has been delivering power transmission and control solutions across a wide range of industries for over 130 years. As an engineer-to-order manufacturer, the company manages decades of engineering data across PLM, ERP, CAD and shared systems. That volume made it difficult for engineers to locate and apply prior designs. Through its partnership with CADDi, Sumitomo reduced the time required to find engineering data by up to 90 percent. In one case, the team identified a closely matched historical design and reclassified a complex order into a streamlined execution, saving weeks of engineering effort. Read the full case study, Transforming Searching into Solving with Sumitomo Drive Technologies, and explore how manufacturers are applying engineering data to improve decision making.

CADDi is a global technology company that develops manufacturing-exclusive data intelligence platforms. Headquartered in Tokyo and Chicago, the company was founded in 2017 by industry veterans Yushiro Kato and Aki Kobashi, formerly of McKinsey and Apple. CADDi brings Japanese design technology expertise to help manufacturers preserve decades of engineering knowledge. Recognized globally for innovation, CADDi was listed in Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies and received the SaaS Award for Best Business Intelligence and Engineering Management Software. Visit us.caddi.com/company.