Challenge
Every fixture went through approval rounds with customer engineers overseas: export PDFs, email, wait for markups, interpret the red circles, revise, repeat. A week per loop was normal, and misread markups caused rework in MIC-6 plate that nobody wanted to pay for.
Solution
The supplier moved fixture design into solidSF and replaced exported PDFs with review packages: customer engineers open the drawing set and the model in a browser, interrogate dimensions directly, and comment against the geometry.
Approved packages release through the vault, and the shop programs 2D plate work from the same documents with posts to its Fanuc mills.
“Approval used to be a PDF with red circles, three emails deep. Now the customer's engineer measures the model himself and signs off on the package.”
Technical director
Results
The approval loop collapsed from a week to about a day, and revision rounds per package fell roughly 40 percent because comments point at geometry instead of describing it.
Plate rework from misread markups has not recurred since the switch.