Case Studies
Heavy Equipment Manufacturer
Appliance Manufacturer
Hobart
Case Study — Hobart
Hobart Corporation is a leader in the retail food equipment industry. They manufacture various types of products, such as ovens, proofers, mixers, slicers, dishwashers, scales, and wrap stations for restaurants, bakeries, correctional facilities, schools, hospitals, and other large- and small-scale food industries. They have over 1,700 trained service technicians to provide service and repairs on all of these various products. They rely heavily on accurate parts catalogs to provide them with timely information on current and out-of-production Hobart equipment.
In mid 1999, they realized they were struggling internally to keep their parts catalogs up to date. They were beginning to get behind on their documentation. New product documentation was 12 to 18 months behind production schedule and revisions to existing product documentation was 2 to 6 years behind in updates. This was putting a serious strain on the product engineers who were being forced to answer service parts questions because of the lack of timely documentation. This is when we began assisting them with illustration support. They were impressed with the high quality illustration and timely turnaround and, in 2000, asked if we could also assist in cataloging the parts as well. Their goal was to get everything to within six months of their engineering changes.
Starting in 2001, we took over all aspects of producing parts catalogs for Hobart. In the first two years, we produced three times the catalogs that they had been averaging for the last eight years, while matching their 1998 yearly staffing budget. This eliminated their backlog of outdated manuals, so that by mid 2003 we were creating and updating manuals concurrently with their engineering department.
Since mid 2003, all parts catalogs have been updated and are available to the 1,700 service technicians as the changes happen. We are doing this at a cost of 25 percent of their 1998 annual staffing budget.
This was accomplished by streamlining the existing processes and by establishing a solid relationship with the various engineers. Additionally, we have made use of solid models that the engineering groups use to design new products.