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A by-the-numbers look at winning manufacturing strategy for the year ahead.Manufacturing in the U.S. has stalled since the great recession of 2010, and labor productivity has stalled despite the introduction of new technologies. In the U.S., we are not yet realizing the benefits of what should be our biggest advantage: A highly trained, well educated workforce. But it's not all doom and gloom. There is clearly some expectation of a shift happening, as we've seen the largest spikes in private investment in the last 15 years in 2024. But where are those investments going? Smart investments now are likely to separate winners from losers over the next 12-24 months. Watch to learn what those smart investments are and how to execute them.

Manufacturing a Successful 2025

Data was stored with inconsistent labels across many systems, leading to lengthy searches, redundant work, and over-reliance on individual expertise

Amerequip

One recurring issue involved mismatched part numbers between customers and Amerequip’s internal system. When a customer referenced a part number that differed from Amerequip’s internal numbering convention, the traditional workflow required searching the ERP for a cross-reference, navigating to a drawing server, opening multiple prints, and confirming the match manually. It was a multi-step process that depended heavily on experience and familiarity with the systems.After implementing CADDi Drawer, that workflow changed. As Bryon Nolan, Head of Quality at Amerequip, described: <h5 class="">"We don’t need to go to LX, do a ‘where used’ BOM, then open the drawing server and search the new part anymore. It’s very handy."</h5><h6 class="">Bryon Nolan Head of Quality</h6> Instead of navigating between ERP and shared drives, Bryon typed the customer’s part number directly into CADDi. Relevant drawings surfaced immediately, along with cross-referenced internal numbers embedded within the documents themselves. What previously required multiple systems and manual validation became a single search.<img src="https://cdn.builder.io/api/v1/image/assets%2F209ee507cedf4c298e100edae4bba2df%2Fd69af3a3443a41389ece1d6d157ba61b?format=webp" class="">Members of the Amerequip and CADDi teams during a recent visit.

The impact extends beyond individual part lookups. As part of the quality review process, Amerequip team focuses on understanding a component’s application within the product, which is especially important during nonconformance reviews and change assessments. Historically, this required running a “where-used” report in ERP, then separately navigating to drawing servers to validate assemblies and prints. It was accurate, but slow.With CADDi, engineers and the Amerequip Quality group can search for a part and simultaneously see the assemblies that reference it, related drawings, and embedded specifications in one view. Bryon summarized it simply: <h5 class="">“Many times, we’re working on a part and we want to understand what it goes into. With CADDi, we type in the part number we are reviewing, and in addition to seeing that part, we are also seeing drawings for assemblies that use it. One search. All the results we want.”</h5><h6 class="">Bryon Nolan Head of Quality</h6> In practice, this reduces system hopping and accelerates root-cause analysis, customer responses, and internal decision-making.

Another powerful example emerged from reviewing a customer bill of materials that listed a component with only a generic description; no drawing reference or additional specification to reference. In the past, that often led to creating a new internal part number and issuing a new purchase order (possibly a new supplier) simply because it was difficult to determine whether the component already existed.Using CADDi’s keyword search and flexible matching logic, Kyle Behrendt from the engineering team was able to identify that the component was already used in another product under a different internal description. Instead of duplicating the part, they reused what already existed. What began as a search workflow evolved into a cost-control and part-standardization opportunity.Kyle describes the ability to find these existing parts:“A large portion of our inventory never came through engineering. Now, with keyword searches in CADDi Drawer, we can finally see those parts. It’s opened up access to components we didn’t even realize we had.”Importantly, this was not driven by theoretical AI capabilities. It was enabled by structured, searchable engineering data brought into one environment. The team could finally connect information that had always existed but lived in separate silos.

The behavioral shift is becoming increasingly visible across the engineering and quality teams.. After several weeks of usage, Bryon shared: <h5 class="">“I expect CADDi to replace network drives as our go-to for searching drawings.”</h5><h6 class="">Bryon Nolan Head of Quality</h6> That change in sentiment reflects more than convenience — it reflects trust. CADDi is quickly becoming the first place people look, not an optional add‑on to an already complex workflow.As Stella Rezabek explained, “To change behavior, you first have to understand where the real pain points are, and time has always been the biggest one.” The workflow interruptions weren’t the issue; the challenge was the amount of time required to gather information each time a challenge came up.With CADDi Drawer’s ability to search part‑number data, extracted drawing text, and metadata using many combinations of filters, engineers can narrow their search far faster than before. Instead of manually checking multiple locations or running separate searches across systems, they can refine results in seconds based on the criteria they choose. Stella Rezabek described the difference directly: <h5 class="">“When you can filter by part numbers, keywords, and drawing text all at once, what used to feel like something that took ages becomes almost instant, and that speed lifts a weight you don’t realize you’ve been carrying.”</h5><h6 class="">Stella Rezabek Mechanical Designer</h6> That reduction in time is influencing how teams respond to questions, review information, and make decisions. The ability to quickly confirm details is encouraging earlier validation and reducing hesitation during daily engineering and quality work.For Tim, that adoption curve has been notable. “It’s not one of those tools where you start to learn it and it takes weeks to see the value. It’s coming on quickly. People are using it for ‘real world’ applications right away.”

As the engagement progressed, Amerequip’s view of the partnership began to shift. This was not a traditional software rollout where a tool is installed and left for the team to figure out. Instead, the implementation evolved through weekly working sessions, real-world use case discovery, and continuous iteration based on how engineers and quality leaders actually work. The focus was practical value, not feature deployment.From the project team’s perspective, one of the strongest differentiators has been the way CADDi handles follow‑through and prioritization. As Stella Rezabek explained, “Not every item can be done immediately, and CADDi is honest about that. What stands out is how thoughtfully they prioritize action items. Nothing disappears, nothing gets ignored, and every ‘Let’s do it later’ still has a clear path forward. That level of accountability is rare, and it shows.”For Tim Dorn, who has led multiple enterprise software implementations, the difference was clear:“In my experience, new software adoption and realizing a positive ROI is often challenging. What’s been different here is the level of interaction and project management during the onboarding process. Without the CADDi team’s support, Amerequip’s adoption would not have happened as quickly or with the same level of impact.”What started as an effort to improve drawing search is becoming something more strategic: a unified engineering knowledge layer that connects drawings, assemblies, specifications, and cross-referenced part numbers into one accessible system. At its core, the transformation is about reducing friction in decision-making — replacing tribal knowledge and system hopping with a single, reliable source of truth.

Data is centralized and organized in CADDi Drawer, allowing anyone to find everything they need with a single search

Amerequip: From Hunting for Drawings to a True “One-Search” Engineering and Quality Workflow

The manufacturer wanted to improve their speed in making accurate quotes. Searching for past data necessary to make an accurate quote could take upwards of 30 minutes, slowing the quotation process significantly.

A Leading Manufacturer

Our client has been manufacturing high-precision metal and plastic products across a wide variety of industries and functions for decades. They aim to be a one stop shop for customers, comprehensive manufacturing services, from prototyping to production.At the same time, the reality of the manufacturing space is that, when it comes to winning jobs, speed is the most important component. Being able to provide a quote as quickly as possible is the most reliable way to improve your win rate for new jobs. But if the quote isn’t accurate, the quality or turnaround time will suffer.In order to properly research new jobs and provide accurate quotes, the manufacturer would cross-reference new requests with old work. This is the best strategy for estimating new costs. However, if searches are slow or give incomplete or inaccurate results, the entire quotation process can grind to a halt. Our client found that each search could take up to 30 minutes to get the correct information. In trying to improve this time, they discovered CADDi.

With CADDi, search speed improved from upwards of 30 minutes to just a minute or two. Users in the manufacturer’s sales engineering team can take drawings, specifications, or any other provided information from the RFQ and instantly gather any and all similar drawings to use as reference. CADDi’s patented drawing similarity search uses bespoke AI to take one drawing and find any that overlap in shape and structure, allowing users to find the right references without needing to remember any labels, part IDs, or file locations. <h5 class="">"The similarity search has just been fantastic."</h5><h6 class="">Member Tooling Estimator Team</h6> Once reference drawings have been found, CADDi brings together all of the information needed to make an accurate quote. Over a million of the manufacturer’s past documents, including sales orders, past quotes, non-compliance reports, and more, have been loaded into CADDi and linked for instant cross-referencing. Users can get a complete picture of a previous project, allowing them to accurately estimate what the new job will ultimately cost, and giving them a starting place to plan the production work. Previous production challenges for similar projects can be proactively addressed, rather than repeated.By drastically reducing the time for each search, and making each search more accurate and impactful, the manufacturer can finish quotes faster than ever without sacrificing accuracy. Best of all, these productivity gains are available to everyone: new hires can operate just as effectively as veterans with easy access to decades of past data.As the manufacturer has come up to speed on using CADDi, they find themselves using it for more and more quotation requests. The Tooling Estimator team estimates that CADDi is being referenced for around 75% of their requests now, a number that will only increase as more team members integrate it into their workflows. The manufacturer plans on expanding its usage of CADDi further, using it to consolidate and standardize their design work.

CADDi’s capabilities allow the manufacturer to make searches in just a couple of minutes. All of the relevant data for pricing is linked together, allowing an accurate quote to be created with minimal work.

Driving faster Quotes and Accurate Estimation with CADDi

On-Demand Webinar: The Hidden Cost of Slow Quotes in Metal FabricationIn custom metal fabrication, the first credible quote usually wins the job. But when quote turnaround stretches from hours to days, you're losing bids on speed and leaving margin on the table. Marcin Zmarzly, Director of Sales at CADDi, and Sid Srivastava, Pre-Sales Manager at CADDi, walk through what actually slows quoting down in a fabrication shop, how to put a number on it, and what changes when your design and quote history becomes searchable by geometry and material instead of part number.You'll Learn:<ul><li>Where quote turnaround time actually goes, step by step, and which delays are searching instead of estimating</li><li>How to measure the cost of slow quoting using RFQ-to-quote turnaround, quote coverage, win rate by response time, and margin variance across similar parts</li><li>How similarity search surfaces comparable past parts with accepted pricing, so estimators price from evidence instead of memory</li></ul>Watch the on-demand webinar now to see what your own drawing and quote history could be telling you.

The Hidden Cost of Slow Quotes in Metal Fabrication: Mythbusters Edition

Engineers and procurement staff want to refer to past drawings when designing and procuring, but searching for drawings based on memory is time-consuming. This inefficiency cuts into the time for core tasks.

Sugino Machine

Sugino Machine is an industrial machinery manufacturer that develops, designs, manufactures, and sells equipment and technologies such as ultra-high pressure water jet cutting machines, parts cleaning machines, and small machining centers. Inheriting the founding spirit of “think for ourselves, make for ourselves, and sell and service for ourselves,” the company has been developing technologies for over 80 years, offering six “ultra-technologies” of “cutting, machining, washing, polishing, crushing, and solving.” Sugino Machine has contributed to the development of diverse industries worldwide and has received high acclaim.At Sugino Machine, there is a high occurrence of custom designs that modify standard products to meet customer requirements. During the design process, designers strive to find and utilize past drawings of parts with the same or similar shapes as much as possible. Creating new drawings not only increases design work hours but also generates additional work in other departments, such as drawing registration and processing method evaluation, leading to increased costs.<img src="https://cdn.builder.io/o/assets%2F209ee507cedf4c298e100edae4bba2df%2F6c871b889c0a4bb1b5a6e0d629df2bff?alt=media&amp;token=08f8f9e1-6635-46cb-b869-6c9c9884ec0e&amp;apiKey=209ee507cedf4c298e100edae4bba2df">Even for new development projects, designers search for past drawings and use them as is if they find the same parts, or refer to how similar parts were designed. In the procurement department, it is crucial to procure at the optimal quantity, price, and timing, so they search for past drawing data to confirm procurement history and proceed with their work.However, since drawings are managed in PDF format or on paper, the only way to find them is to rely on each person’s memory or predict based on the part name, which takes a huge amount of time to search for past records.Although a drawing management system is in place, it is used to manage drawing versions and the relationships between parts depicted in drawings, such as which parts are attached to which drawings. It is difficult to search for parts with similar shapes or search based on the text written in the drawings, making it challenging to find similar drawings from the past. The time that should be spent on core tasks is being consumed by searching for drawings.

Sugino Machine, facing the challenge of “low searchability of drawing data,” learned about the drawing data utilization cloud, CADDi Drawer, while exploring solutions. By implementing CADDi Drawer, it becomes possible to display search results as a list using keywords, part numbers, or images in about 2 seconds. Considering it optimal for improving drawing search speed and reducing work hours, Sugino Machine began considering and decided to implement the system.Yasu from the Precision Machinery Division describes the implementation process: “They devised various ways to use the system, and whenever we had questions, we received answers promptly.”“When we made requests for specific features, they were fulfilled in a relatively short period. The most challenging part of starting something new is getting it to take root. This speedy response was a significant factor in our decision to implement the system.”Within about three weeks of implementation and the start of operation, Sugino Machine completed the registration of tens of thousands of drawings, enabling immediate searching and viewing of similar drawings. The accuracy of drawing searches has also improved by using functions such as multi-condition searches. In some cases, a 50% reduction in work hours has been achieved compared to before implementation.Tak from the Precision Machinery Division describes the effects and expectations after implementation:“The most important thing in establishing a system is understanding. To varying degrees, people have a status quo bias, and they will resist if a system, no matter how wonderful, is forced upon them. From now on, I believe visible effects will emerge, whether in work hours or costs. Of course, educational activities are also necessary, but when one department seems to be doing well lately, and it turns out that CADDi Drawer is one of the reasons, it should naturally lead to increased usage.”“In the procurement department and among designers, there are often cases where designers spend time on non-design tasks without even realizing it. With CADDi Drawer, they may suddenly find that their work is finished earlier than usual, creating time that can be used for other purposes.”“I hope this will lead to the development of new technologies or other advancements.”

Sugino Machine is also considering further utilization of CADDi Drawer. First, they plan to expand and establish usage in the initial implementation departments, and eventually consider expanding to other departments. By doing so, they hope to use drawings as a common communication tool and promote information sharing between departments.“When there are many types of products, the number of design departments also increases. However, we have not quite reached the point of sharing drawings between departments. On the other hand, there is only one procurement department. Drawings come from different departments, and there may actually be something similar. If we can easily search for similar drawings and view past records, we can identify the most cost-effective options. I expect CADDi Drawer to lead to such realizations.”“We can now view drawings across the company, and I hope this will trigger innovation.”Sugino Machine not only improves operational efficiency with CADDi Drawer but also transforms drawing data into an asset to drive change and continue contributing to the development of diverse industries worldwide.

Similar drawings from the past can be found immediately, significantly reducing work hours. There is anticipation that drawing data can be transformed into an asset and used as a common communication tool.

Escaping the Inefficient Cycle and Changing How Time is Spent

Without a way to locate similar past drawings, teams designed new parts from scratch each time. Part numbers multiplied as a result. Locating past drawings heavily required veteran instinct and know-how, and with those veterans nearing retirement, preventing the loss of that expertise became urgent.

YKK's competitive edge comes from its commitment to fully integrated in-house production, handling everything from melting raw materials to manufacturing its own machinery. But Matsui, Managing Executive Officer and General Manager of the Machinery Manufacturing Department, saw that this self-reliant approach had become a drag on change. The team regularly created new drawings without referring to the existing inventory, and part numbers ballooned as a result. That approach worked in the era of mass production, but with low-cost, high-performance equipment from countries like China entering the market and demand shifting toward smaller-lot, higher-variety production, Matsui recognized YKK couldn't maintain its competitiveness without breaking from that mindset.This wave of part number proliferation and over-reliance on individual expertise created real tension on the manufacturing floor. Ogawa, General Manager of the Manufacturing Control Group, describes manufacturing's basic idea as building exactly what the drawing shows, but in practice, so much tacit knowledge lived on the floor that the team relied on veteran instinct to get the job done. Certain drawings could only be produced by certain people or certain machines, and a closed culture kept technical information from leaving the department, so the team's pace began slipping against external risks.Nishida, General Manager of Business Operations, recalls that procurement work had become so dependent on individuals that switching the person in charge would cause problems. Miyazaki, General Manager of the Production Engineering Office, saw the same dynamic at the design stage: even when a similar shape already existed, people would draw up a new one and repeat similar quote requests. Across departments, a negative cycle had taken hold in which past work simply wasn't being reused.

The catalyst for change was the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. With travel restricted, Matsui took a hard look at operations and was struck by how analog things still were: drawings, for instance, could only be exchanged by mail. A further push came after the pandemic eased, from an experience with an outside partner company.YKK had handed a supplier a drawing that listed 15 process steps, only to learn the supplier was completing the same work in a single step. That realization made Matsui feel the urgent need to shift the mindset across the organization.Around the same time, an organizational restructuring tightened management oversight. Nishida recalls the pressure of that period: the old approach wasn't going to cut it anymore, and the team needed a new way to visualize and standardize individual know-how, one that could eliminate the over-reliance on individuals in procurement.

Among the many products available, the department chose CADDi, the manufacturing AI data platform. The deciding factors were CADDi's startup-like speed, its technical fit for the problem, and the passion for manufacturing CADDi's staff brought to the table. Adoption wasn't without resistance on the ground. Shima, of the Production Engineering Office, admits the previous vendor's system took more than 30 seconds to search, and there was some skepticism on the floor that this would just be more of the same. What dissolved that skepticism was the speed of CADDi Drawer, CADDi's cloud application for manufacturing data utilization, and the reduction in time spent on daily tasks.Even veteran staff have told Shima's team it's easy to use, and mid-career employees are discovering things too, like realizing another department already found a cheaper procurement option, simply by using the tool themselves.Takamatsu, of the Manufacturing Reform Execution Team, drove adoption by getting directly involved on the shop floor and building trust with the team there. Being able to access information easily was essential to the goal of shortening manufacturing lead time, and Takamatsu was surprised the team could link a drawing to its past defect history within just a few days. CADDi Drawer has sped up information extraction and informed decisions on process consolidation, and now even the quality team uses it regularly.These results aligned with a broader management vision, articulated by Miyazaki, of making CADDi Drawer the go-to search entry point to accelerate parts standardization, and momentum quickly built for taking CADDi adoption to an even higher level.

CADDi also proved to be a solution to a demographic imbalance the Production Engineering Office had been facing: an age gap split between employees in their sixties and those in their twenties, with almost no one in between. Shima sees real value in accumulating, as a digital asset, the know-how that had been at risk of disappearing as veterans retired or transferred elsewhere.Shima's team brought all of its defect root-cause analysis and supplier guidance records into CADDi. New employees are now told to check with AI and CADDi Drawer first, and only ask veteran staff if they still can't find the answer, which has grown the range of work people can handle on their own.Miyazaki also praised the dramatic increase in the speed of process rationalization for parts, while pointing to what comes next: this is currently an effort within the Machinery Manufacturing Department, but true efficiency gains will require bringing the design department into the fold and driving change further upstream.Ogawa sees this shift as a major step toward turning the tacit knowledge on the shop floor into explicit, quantified knowledge through AI. Shima also praises CADDi's customer success team, noting that it responds quickly, often coming back the same day with proposals related to information extraction whenever the team raises a request, energizing everyone involved.

The project is now moving toward a fundamental transformation of the manufacturing process. Matsui wants to build an organization where people spend their time on more creative work rather than being buried in rework. Using AI to ensure the same quality fasteners can be delivered from any factory anywhere in the world is the vision the team is aiming for. Digitalization and AI adoption are essential if Japanese manufacturing is going to compete, and Matsui wants to expand this challenge beyond the department to the rest of the manufacturing industry.Nishida envisions sales planning, manufacturing, and procurement automatically connected, able to run with a minimal team.YKK's long tradition of fully integrated production, combined with AI technology, stands as a signpost for how Japanese manufacturing can break free of its self-reliant mindset and gain new competitiveness through digital transformation.

A "check with AI and CADDi first" mindset has taken hold across the team, expanding the scope of work employees can handle on their own and speeding up new-hire training and collaboration across departments. Drawing data is now searchable at scale, so the team can group parts suited for process rationalization instantly and request consolidation and review right away.

From Instinct to Insight: How YKK Is Turning Tacit Knowledge Into a Manufacturing Asset

Yanmar struggled with cost and labor-hour challenges because accumulated historical drawings and data weren't being effectively utilized. Drawing searches took so long that employees couldn't devote time to higher-value work, and knowledge became overly concentrated in a handful of specialists.

Yanmar Holdings

Founded in 1912, Yanmar successfully commercialized the world's first practical small diesel engine in 1933. Since then, the company has expanded into a wide range of businesses, including large engines, agricultural machinery, energy systems, and machine tools, establishing itself as a diversified industrial machinery manufacturer. As of 2026, Yanmar employs more than 20,000 people globally and operates over 100 sites overseas.Yanmar Holdings laid out six strategic priorities as part of its mid-term strategy beginning in 2022, one of which was building a next-generation management foundation to support digital transformation. The Digital Strategy Promotion Department was formed with this mission in mind.Seomori, Section Chief of the Digital Transformation Promotion Group within the Digital Strategy Promotion Department, explains that simply rolling out digital tools top-down doesn't lead to effective transformation. Instead, Yanmar took a bottom-up approach the team calls "grassroots digital transformation," built on strong commitment from top management. The goal is digitalization that genuinely fits frontline realities, with frontline employees themselves building the literacy and skills to use digital tools effectively.There's a common argument that digital transformation should be driven top-down through strong leadership commitment. At the same time, Yanmar Group encompasses many different business units, each facing distinct challenges with different optimal solutions, making it difficult to push a single top-down approach across the board. Results depend heavily on the motivation of the people actually doing the work on the ground, so Yanmar also made it a priority to respect and nurture that frontline motivation. Combining top-down and bottom-up approaches became a key factor in achieving the company's mission.

In today's volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous business environment, many companies face pressure from labor shortages and currency fluctuations. Even under these conditions, sustainable growth requires stable earnings and reliable product and service delivery. Yanmar aims to improve quality, cost, and delivery, along with customer value, by shifting limited working hours toward higher-value tasks.Kono, who leads day-to-day execution within the Digital Transformation Promotion Group, describes the challenge Yanmar faced:Drawings in particular presented a range of challenges. During the development phase, when product costs are largely determined, it was difficult to make use of historical drawings and cost data. Yanmar also lacked the ability to search for similar drawings, which made it harder for younger employees to build expertise and led to an overreliance on veteran staff.Improving efficiency is now the baseline expectation. Rather than simply cutting time and stopping there, the goal is to redirect that reclaimed time toward more essential, creative work such as advanced analysis and negotiation. Achieving this kind of talent activation requires changing existing workflows and processes on the ground, and change often draws pushback. To realize grassroots digital transformation, Yanmar needed a partner who would do more than present an idealized vision. The company wanted a partner who would work alongside its teams.

Kono describes how Yanmar came to pilot CADDi, the manufacturing AI data platform, and its application, CADDi Drawer, a cloud tool for manufacturing data utilization:Yanmar already had strong top-level commitment to digital transformation, and the motivation among the employees actually doing the work was high as well. The pilot focused on the upstream parts of the value chain that handle drawing data, primarily development, procurement, and cost departments. The team included volunteers from each department, along with promotion leads from Yanmar Holdings and customer success support from CADDi, forming a group of roughly 50 people in total. The team held regular meetings, set KPIs and milestones, and evaluated the pilot against criteria such as whether it addressed existing pain points and whether it delivered an ROI of 100% or more.

Yanmar ran the pilot for roughly six months. The results showed strong potential for efficiency gains and standardization across the cost, procurement, development, quality control, and quality assurance departments. Search, selection, evaluation, information sharing, and training all became more efficient, with expectations for further gains through drawing standardization, reuse-based design, and greater cost awareness. Other qualitative benefits included improved skills and motivation among younger employees, as veteran expertise became documented and explicit knowledge. Keyword and similarity searches on text within drawings were used frequently, and similarity search in particular made a strong impact. The cost department had previously struggled to efficiently find similarly sized parts when preparing cost estimates. With CADDi Drawer's similarity search, the team could search across parts of different sizes linked to cost data, enabling rapid analysis of the relationship between weight and cost. This made it possible to efficiently identify whether there was a gap between expected and actual costs, and to investigate why. Analysis that had previously been difficult became achievable, freeing up time for higher-value work. In other departments, teams explored relationships such as part length versus cost, and positive feedback and new use cases continued to emerge from the field. Beyond the cost department, motivated younger employees in particular shifted toward using time saved through automation for analysis and higher-value work, a clear example of talent activation. Information registered in CADDi Drawer also became a shared language that breaks down barriers between departments, and sharing hyperlinks by email made cross-team communication more active. The impact goes beyond simple labor savings, extending to a real shift in mindset and culture among participants.

Through the CADDi pilot, Yanmar confirmed that breaking down barriers between departments allowed frontline employees to take ownership and drive change themselves. Going forward, Yanmar plans to expand these best practices to other business units and pursue optimization across the entire value chain, including global supply chain transformation and the engineering chain. These efforts are central to achieving Yanmar's mid-term strategy. Seomori closed with these thoughts on transformation and what lies ahead: every company has its own history and culture, so there's no single template that works for everyone. Rather than dismissing the analog methods the company has relied on, Yanmar wants to respect them while using digital technology to make them better, working through that process together with the people on the ground. Changing how things are done often causes a temporary dip in efficiency, so it's natural for frontline employees to feel some resistance. To keep initiatives from stalling because of that, Yanmar focuses on helping people understand the purpose behind the work as they move forward, identifying employees who want to take on digital challenges, supporting them, and connecting them across the organization to build company-wide momentum. What the company gained from this pilot is a valuable asset, one it plans to scale across other business units to maximize the impact for the group as a whole.

By cutting the time needed for drawing and data searches, Yanmar freed up hours that could be redirected to higher-value work and skill development. Overreliance on individual specialists eased, and motivated younger employees began proactively driving improvements.

Grassroots Digital Transformation: How Yanmar Holdings Is Freeing Up Talent by Unifying Drawing Data

With limited resources, the team had little time to spare for value-added proposals to customers or for developing core technology further. Their efforts were confined to surface-level efficiency gains and partial automation using in-house tools, leaving little room to address deeper structural issues.

DENSO

The depth of the conversations with CADDi was one of the key factors behind DENSO's decision to move to full adoption. Those conversations surfaced an uncomfortable truth behind the capacity problem: engineers didn't document why they made a change, so the next person couldn't build on that decision and ended up redoing the work. Without documentation, that knowledge couldn't be referenced during later design work.Confronting the issue of rework was a challenge. Employees were aware rework existed, but it had come to be seen as something that just happens rather than a problem to solve. Through the conversations with CADDi, that changed: stakeholders, including senior leadership, became motivated to solve it.Without those conversations, Oba believes DENSO might have taken the long way around, chasing surface-level fixes instead of the root cause. Once the team defined the core issue as reducing rework, the division head took ownership of the initiative himself, called for it to be division-led, and built a one-team structure together with frontline leaders.

DENSO is now running several pilots using CADDi. Results are showing in one of the harder areas to tackle: automating process FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis), which requires capturing human thought processes in structured form. The accuracy has exceeded the team's expectations, energizing them to try automating other processes as well. CADDi Drawer, CADDi's cloud application for manufacturing data utilization, played a key role in extracting and applying knowledge from documents the company had accumulated over the years. Early on, with other vendor solutions also on the table, the team debated whether it was worth consolidating data specifically on CADDi. The results mattered for reasons that went beyond choosing one tool over another.CADDi also became the foundation for converting tacit knowledge, drawings, and technical materials that had long been siloed with individual experts, into explicit knowledge accessible to everyone. That path wasn't smooth. The team ran into real challenges with how past data had been kept: missing information and gaps in context surfaced as they tried to turn existing knowledge into structured data.Oba came away with a clear realization: the reasoning behind past outcomes had never been preserved, and recognizing that gap became valuable for deciding what to do next.Now that the issue is defined, attitudes on the ground are shifting. Oba is working to encourage members of the working group to speak up and to flag when more data is needed.Together, these efforts let DENSO automate FMEA, structuring tacit knowledge into explicit, high-precision assets. By building an environment where designers can draw on past knowledge, a pattern is emerging: preventing rework before it happens while also shortening lead time.

DENSO has long had a culture of self-reliance, built on the belief that there's nothing the company can't do itself. This time, it deliberately chose to bring in outside help.Oba points to a limit on how fast purely internal development can move. Bringing in outside expertise accelerated the pilots, and CADDi's customer success team gave DENSO a consistent source of outside perspective, including objective feedback on how DENSO compares to other companies.The project drew a clear line: harder automation work and advanced problem-solving would be tackled together with CADDi, while smaller frontline improvements and tool-building would stay in-house, through what the team calls citizen development. Oba notes that tools go unused if the team doesn't build them itself, so alongside the CADDi partnership, DENSO is also nurturing the culture of self-driven improvement that has always been part of its DNA.

With the pilot underway, the goal ahead is concrete. DENSO wants to confirm the impact of the current pilot within the next fiscal year and treat the end of fiscal year 2027 as a milestone for delivering results.Beyond that, DENSO plans to take the model built in Japan and roll it out to overseas sites, starting with China, for a multiplying effect at global scale. Twenty years into his career, Oba has moved beyond the boundaries of production engineering to pursue transformation with an eye on total optimization. He used to work entirely within the boundaries of production engineering; now he thinks about the bigger picture. A straightforward KPI like cycle time used to be enough, but figuring out how to set KPIs for something as hard to measure as digitalization through AI is a new kind of challenge. Since joining DENSO, Oba has been told not to be afraid to fail and to take on challenges, and given the freedom to pursue more technology. Using the capacity freed up by CADDi, he wants to make higher-value proposals, reduce defects, and raise the quality of DENSO's manufacturing, working with DENSO's promotion team and CADDi to build that future. Oba also values the outside perspective CADDi's customer success team continues to provide on industry trends, calling that information and those insights valuable assets to DENSO.DENSO and CADDi's collaboration is working to establish a new standard for value creation: freeing up capacity and shortening lead time through AI, and the manufacturing DX that lies beyond it.

By tackling the design rework challenge head-on, the newly available capacity once spent on repetitive fixes was redirected toward higher-value work. Lead times shortened as a result.

Eliminating Rework and Freeing Up Capacity Through AI at DENSO

In both design and procurement, work became increasingly dependent on individuals, leading to the creation of numerous new drawings and significant fluctuations in procurement prices.

Kashiyama Industries

Kashiyama Industries successfully developed the dry vacuum pump, which became its flagship product, in 1986, and has since engaged in the manufacturing and development of numerous vacuum devices. The company, which upholds "Faster, Fewer, Simpler" as its action guidelines across the organization, is highly regarded in the market for its quick response to industry needs. Kashiyama Industries holds a top position globally in the dry vacuum pump industry, essential for semiconductor and liquid crystal panel manufacturing.Kashiyama Industries has its own processing division and has been processing key parts that determine product performance in-house. Other parts are ordered from various suppliers. A single product can use as many as 100 different parts, and the total number of parts for all products handled by the company at any given time reaches approximately 15,000. Moreover, the products manufactured by Kashiyama Industries often involve custom designs based on customer specifications, resulting in a large number of unique drawings being created daily.The drawings are stored in a drawing management system introduced in recent years. However, the details of the drawings were only known to the design engineers and procurement personnel involved in the orders. To find drawings of past similar projects, the only options were to ask the relevant person or to manually search through each drawing, which required an enormous amount of time. Additionally, since the purchase history data and drawing data were managed in separate systems, even if the relevant drawing was found, it was necessary to open the order management system to search for the purchase history related to that drawing.In principle, procurement should involve comparing multiple suppliers to select the most suitable one. However, many cases prioritized delivery time, making the selection heavily reliant on the experience of the procurement personnel. As a result, procurement work became increasingly individualized, leading to fluctuations in procurement prices of up to 20-30% for similar cases.Similarly, in the design department, the lengthy search process often led to the creation of new drawings instead of utilizing available similar drawings. The use of past drawings and knowledge depended on the designer's experience, further advancing individual dependence in this area.

Kashiyama Industries was seeking to reduce individual dependence in design and procurement, minimize procurement price fluctuations, improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, and promote standardization through the unification of parts. The growing demand for semiconductors was expected to further increase the need for dry vacuum pumps in the future, making a quick response to these needs imperative.As Kashiyama Industries searched for a new system, they were introduced to CADDi Drawer, a cloud-based drawing data utilization service. After a successful trial, they decided to implement the system. "It was very user-friendly. One of the key factors in our decision to implement CADDi Drawer was its ability to address areas that our existing drawing management system couldn't," explained Kyohei Hara, Procurement Department, Production Headquarters, discussing the background of the implementation. "One of the key factors in our decision to implement CADDi Drawer was its ability to address areas that our existing drawing management system couldn't."- Kyohei Hara, Procurement Department With the implementation, the efficiency of procurement department operations significantly improved. CADDi Drawer allows keyword searches based on the contents noted in the remarks column of registered drawings. This reduced the time required to search for similar drawings by a significant margin compared to the previous methods of asking around or guessing and checking. Now, anyone can easily find the necessary drawings. Additionally, since similar drawings are linked to purchase records, there is no longer a need to switch between multiple systems, resulting in an average reduction of over 60% in the time required to gather information about the parts to be ordered, select the supplier, and finalize the order.The ability to perform instant searches also enables the selection of the most suitable supplier based on past records without relying on personal experience. This has resolved fluctuations in procurement prices and reduced procurement costs. The ease of using similar parts also contributes to these benefits. Previously, cost reductions were primarily achieved through mass production effects by increasing lot sizes, but now it is also possible to reduce costs by switching to similar, more affordable parts or standardizing parts. CADDi Drawer has thus achieved the goals of improving operational efficiency, reducing costs, and promoting standardization.

The positive impact of the implementation extended to the design department. The ability to easily search for similar drawings made it possible to reference them during the design process and consider the standardization of parts. This reduced the number of new drawings created. Even when creating new drawings, it became easier to utilize past drawings. Less experienced designers used to rely on asking more experienced colleagues if similar drawings existed, but CADDi Drawer eliminates this need. Now, designers of all experience levels can easily leverage past design knowledge.Kotaro Nakatani, Deputy General Manager, Procurement Department, Production Headquarters, discussed the future prospects of using CADDi Drawer: "Initially, the implementation project mainly involved design and procurement. In the future, we hope to operate it as a project that includes departments such as manufacturing, production technology, and quality assurance. "Using CADDi Drawer, inter-departmental communication becomes easier."- Kotaro Nakatani, Deputy General Manager, Procurement Department For example, if there is a problem with a product, quality assurance can investigate whether the same issue affects similar parts or related products and horizontally deploy this information to other departments. By using CADDi Drawer, inter-departmental communication becomes easier. I believe it would be beneficial if departments could collaborate across functions to propose design methods or cost-saving measures."Kashiyama Industries plans to continue practicing "Faster, Fewer, Simpler" and remains committed to ongoing improvement efforts and challenges.

CADDi Drawer enables anyone to instantly search for similar drawings and purchase records, leading to improved operational efficiency, cost reduction, and standardization promotion.

Resolving Fluctuations in Procurement Prices

Mitsubishi Materials already incorporated modern data management practices, but needed to take it to the next level in order to make custom-engineered products more efficient.

Mitsubishi Materials USA

Mitsubishi Materials USA implemented CADDi to take their repository of engineering and sales data and make it more searchable and insightful. When tackling a new engineering project, CADDi can instantly surface relevant past designs to give design engineers a head start. Everything from past design revisions to quality reports is collected for each drawing, allowing engineers to accelerate their design process and more efficiently incorporate the lessons learned from past projects.

When new custom orders come in, CADDi’s dynamic search capabilities help streamline workflows. CADDi’s ability to search and index information extracted from drawings, materials, and notes allows the sales teams to find relevant data from any starting point. They can quickly verify if a requested custom design is similar to a previously manufactured project and extract relevant information without a back-and-forth with the engineering department or the requesting company to get specific information.A regional sales manager for Mitsubishi Materials USA spoke on the ability to find critical sales and cost data quickly:Mitsubishi is looking forward to expanding CADDi’s application beyond the initial implementation. As more team members get up to speed on using CADDi and integrate it into their workflows, it creates productivity gains larger than the sum of their parts. By continuously utilizing CADDi, Mitsubishi Materials USA is ensuring that its custom engineering is supported by fast, consistent, and searchable knowledge.

With CADDi, new custom projects get off the ground faster, with quick and accurate lookup of relevant previous drawings to work from.

Unlocking the Potential of High-Value Custom Engineering

To retrieve drawing-related information, team members previously submitted formal inquiries to the design department. Due to high workloads, responses often took a week or longer, creating bottlenecks that delayed every stage of production.

SUBARU

The automotive industry is currently experiencing a once-in-a-century transformation, driven by the convergence of the CASE (Connected, Autonomous/Automated, Shared, Electric) paradigm: a new mentality towards consumer demands for cars. This period demands not only product innovation but a total revolution of manufacturing processes. In response, SUBARU Corporation has announced a new management strategy, the "One SUBARU" initiative. This strategy emphasizes returning to a flexible and agile organizational culture, closely integrating manufacturing, development, and the supply chain to enhance productivity.<img src="https://cdn.builder.io/api/v1/image/assets%2F209ee507cedf4c298e100edae4bba2df%2F25c182481ac0452aaca020294fc4ef59">SUBARU facilitiesWithin this context, the Cost Innovation Promotion Department was established to address cost-related challenges and formulate strategies across the organization. SUBARU aims to be at the forefront of "Manufacturing Innovation" and "Value Creation" under its new management system. One significant goal in "Manufacturing Innovation" is to halve the number of processes, components, and steps involved in production, starting with the reduction of non-productive work.The existing system at SUBARU required specific information such as part numbers or design notification numbers to search for drawings. This often necessitated inquiries to the busy design department, with responses taking up to one or two weeks, causing delays in operations. Even within the design department, finding drawings was challenging for those working in different areas or with less experience.

SUBARU sought ways to leverage its accumulated drawing assets to reduce non-productive tasks. The company identified CADDi Drawer, a cloud-based manufacturing data AI platform, as a potential solution."I have about 20 years of experience in design," says Kei Matsumura, EP Planning, Cost Innovation Promotion Department. “In the design work, searching for drawings took up a significant amount of time. I always felt that if I had more time, I could engage in work that added more value.”When Matsumura learned about CADDi, it resonated with him, as he knew that it could reduce the tedious searching and unlock valuable additional time to do meaningful work.Following the introduction of CADDi, SUBARU succeeded in reducing the time spent on drawing searches and inquiries across the company by several hundred hours per month. As use of CADDi expands across departments, these time savings are expected to multiply even further.Masateru Ido, from the Cost Innovation Promotion Department, also found CADDi revolutionary:"Many data management solutions focus on merely accumulating information, but CADDi allows us to analyze and utilize the data within the same system.”Finding cost reduction opportunities requires quick and consistent access to data. For example, you have two similar designs with different costs, and you want to understand where the cost differences come from to ensure cost-effective future designs. Before CADDi, Ito would have to request this sort of information from the design team, often waiting over a week for a response. With CADDi, he could immediately find the information he needed himself.

‍The introduction of CADDi has also contributed to talent development. Previously, new employees needed to be guided to specific drawing numbers to search for the right documents. Now, they can search for drawings by product name or material using keywords, making it easier to find the information they need without involving senior employees and taking them away from valuable tasks."Before, if you didn’t know the drawing number, you couldn’t search for a drawing. Even if you wanted to inquire, you’d first need to figure out who to ask. Now, even without the drawing number, you can search by part name. For example, typing 'bumper' will immediately bring up the relevant drawing, making information much more accessible. The amount of information that can be referenced for decision-making has increased dramatically since CADDi Drawer was introduced. Moreover, the cycle of researching and obtaining information by oneself enhances learning, and those using CADDi Drawer are undoubtedly becoming more skilled. The new value creation, evolution in creativity, and the impact on human resource development are immeasurable. Moving forward, I hope CADDi Drawer will further energize communication, serving as a starting point for projects from planning through after-sales, involving the entire supply chain. Our goal is to create an environment where everyone uses it." - Kei MatsumuraThe Cost Innovation Promotion Department is now spreading the good word of CADDi across the rest of SUBARU. As a result, the number of proactive users across departments is steadily increasing. Yuji Otani, another member of the Cost Innovation Promotion Department, summedSUBARU’s "One SUBARU" initiative aims to standardize CADDi Drawer across the company. They envision a future where CADDi Drawer is the first tool employees turn to, not only in design and manufacturing departments but also in subsidiaries, overseas affiliates, and suppliers. Through this comprehensive adoption, SUBARU strives to achieve world-leading manufacturing through revolutionary improvement in data access, insightful analysis, and onboarding.

With CADDi, team members skip the long inquiry process to the design department: the information they need is easy to find. This eliminates hundreds of hours of unnecessary slowdowns every month.

Accelerating Every Stage of Design and Production with CADDi

After merging four companies in 2021, Astemo found itself managing duplicate workflows and disconnected systems, forcing teams to keep running each legacy company's processes side by side rather than as one. Rushing to integrate meant piecing together a "lowest common multiple" system that tried to satisfy every legacy company's needs at once, and the resulting time lost hunting for product data hit overseas sites especially hard.

Astemo

Astemo Corporation covers a wide range of products spanning both four-wheel and two-wheel vehicles, including electric powertrains and advanced chassis systems. Formed through the merger of four companies in January 2021, the company launched with high hopes of expanding sales channels and improving R&amp;D efficiency by combining each company's strengths.But the road to integration brought harsh realities. The first obstacle was fragmentation across the legacy organizations, and Astemo was no exception. Each of the four legacy companies had kept its own separate systems, everything from design and development tools to ERP, leaving information fragmented. And the problem wasn't limited to systems. Even something as fundamental as the process from customer inquiry to the start of mass production differed completely across the four legacy companies.General Director Shintaro Hikuma described the toll this took directly, explaining that his team had to keep producing documents the old way while simultaneously complying with the rules of the new Astemo, effectively doubling their workload.<img src="https://cdn.builder.io/api/v1/image/assets%2F209ee507cedf4c298e100edae4bba2df%2Ffd5b8a281b04442e9d6e3a026045b557">In the integration project, prioritizing speed led to building a large, unwieldy system and set of business processes that tried to accommodate every legacy company's way of doing things. Looking back, Shintaro describes it as having "created rules based on a lowest-common-multiple mindset," reflecting that the team hadn't been able to sufficiently simplify requirements at the time.Around that time, at Astemo, physical distance compounded the problem, making it chronically difficult to access information like design and cost data. The time spent tracking down that information kept eating into the team's actual work.

The catalyst for change came from a chance encounter: the division leader at the time crossed paths with CADDi Inc. at a trade show and, intrigued by what he saw, encouraged Shintaro to look into the company further. Shintaro researched CADDi right before his posting to Vietnam and immediately sensed it was a very strong match for the problems they were facing.Getting it to take hold on the ground wasn't easy, though. At first, few team members initially saw it as something directly relevant to their own work.What changed things was hands-on experience with a CADDi demo. Showing skeptical team members the actual Similarity Search and Document Linking features sparked a lightbulb moment, and they quickly began to grasp the practical value it could bring to their work.That hands-on sense of "this actually works," felt directly by the people on the ground, is what changed the mood across the organization.And the deciding factor in adopting CADDi wasn't just that the tool proved useful in practice. Shintaro adds that it also came down to CADDi's deep understanding of manufacturing, and the trust that built.General Director Shintaro Hikuma noted that CADDi's team came to their factory to understand what was happening on the ground, and that the simple and transparent nature of their proposals made CADDi different from other vendors. More than anything, he felt on an instinctive level that he wanted to work with people who approached problem-solving with real passion and a mission to transform Japanese manufacturing.

Rollout began with three departments: production engineering, the project management team, and quality assurance. Since quoting and form management were where the pain points were felt most strongly, adoption spread quickly.From there, real change started to take hold. With much less time spent gathering and verifying information, the team could start considering how to redirect resources into new areas.Quality inspection illustrates this well. Historically, each new problem prompted the addition of another inspection item, but the team never had time to revisit whether earlier inspections were still necessary, causing the workload to grow steadily over time. Now, with that time reclaimed, the team can question whether each inspection still serves a purpose, and expects this practice to reduce the overall inspection burden. There is also growing optimism that AI could help ease the load of approval processes and similar tasks going forward.Another major outcome mentioned was that a team once entirely consumed by responding to customer requests can now proactively research competitor activity and think ahead about creating value before being asked. Given the company's original goal of maintaining market share, that shift matters a great deal.An unexpected change also emerged. General Director Shintaro Hikuma observed that team members have grown noticeably more proactive about using digital tools, increasingly approaching problems with a sense that they can tackle solutions themselves. He credits this shift directly to their hands-on experience with CADDi.Team members who were once skeptical of IT and digital tools now come forward on their own with questions and requests about the tool. A culture of embracing digital technology is starting to take root within the organization.

The team is working to optimize quoting processes overall and shorten production launch lead times using CADDi Drawer. This momentum is helping build a structure that can respond to customer needs more quickly and flexibly.Shintaro's next focus is creating synergy across company divisions. While respecting each site's own priorities, the plan is to eliminate wasteful duplication across group companies that strains cash flow, generating two or even three times the synergy.Beyond that lies an even bigger vision: visualizing and optimizing the global supply chain, and unifying inventory management systems across the group.General Director Shintaro Hikuma believes that value comes from having a countermeasure for every failure encountered along the way. He hopes leaders will give frontline teams real opportunities to try new things, and that the people driving change on the ground will have the resolve and boldness to keep pushing forward by starting small. As he put it, holding back on change means the thousands of people on the ground end up paying the price for years to come, while if something fails, he alone bears the responsibility as the person who championed it. That calculation is what led him to simply try.Rather than waiting for perfect preparation, start at the smallest possible scale and let hands-on experience change the organization. Building a culture, together, from both leadership and the frontline, where people aren't afraid to fail and keep trying. That's the essential lesson Astemo's digital transformation push has proven.One site's success now serves as the starting point for productivity gains across the entire Astemo group, and its momentum toward stronger competitiveness continues to build.

With less time spent gathering and verifying quoting and production data, Astemo's team redirected their energy toward higher-value work like competitive research and refining customer requirements, while also picking up momentum on quality inspection reviews and shorter production launch timelines. Adopting CADDi became the catalyst for a broader culture of self-driven digital adoption among frontline staff.

'Just Try It': How Astemo Sparked a Grassroots Digital Culture Shift

CADDi leverages AI to digitize drawings and procurement data, making manufacturing insights searchable by shape, text, dimensions and part names.