Company Info:
Founded in 1988, mk North America is a member of, and North American headquarters for the mk Technology Group. They design, engineer, and manufacture a wide variety of conveyors including belt conveyors, roller conveyors, timing belt conveyors, chain conveyors and flexible flat top chain conveyors; as well as workpiece pallet-handling conveyor systems, and extruded aluminum framing (including guarding and linear motion systems). They offer incredible variety and flexibility, and their products have proven themselves worldwide in a broad variety of applications and industries.
For more information, please visit: https://www.mknorthamerica.com
A Smooth and Easy Transition to Variant!
Challenge
Like many other manufacturers, mk North America uses Autodesk Inventor and iLogic for their product designs. They previously used Autodesk Configurator 360 to make the designs available on their website for customers to create their own configurations but needed to find a new option once Configurator 360 was no longer available. They did diligent research into what products were available and explored all their options. For a while, they considered building their own configurator but realized it would require a complete overhaul of their current systems and workflows, costing them more time than they could spare.
Once it was clear to mk North America that they would greatly benefit from some outside expertise, they turned back to online research and found SolidCAD’s newly announced cloud-based configurator, Variant.
Solution
Variant was just what they were looking for. Since our online configurator uses Autodesk Forge Design Automation API for Inventor, it can directly leverage iLogic code in existing CAD models. This allowed mk North America to smoothly transition to Variant without wasting valuable time on re-work or any major disruptions to their established workflows.
Design engineer, Will Peters, spoke about how they were not new to configurators. Since they were already using Configurator 360, almost every other solution they investigated would require massive changes on their end. “The nice thing about Variant,” he explained, “was that we only needed to make some pretty minor adjustments. It operated on the same platform so it wasn’t as full of a process as it would have been with another product.”
mk North America expressed how impressed they were with the SolidCAD technical team’s expertise and communication. Although they were already very familiar with Autodesk Inventor, they were able to learn more in depth information about what goes on in the backend and how all their systems work together. Ultimately, it was a great benefit to continue working with the platforms they knew, and they are grateful they did not decide to face this challenge on their own.
An extra benefit to mk North America was our team’s ability to thoroughly assess and understand their needs. “We had looked into a couple different solutions,” explained Kate Nadeau, marketing manager at mk North America, “the big thing that pushed us this direction was that [SolidCAD] was still developing the tool when we signed on. We knew that we would have a voice… Even though the major framework was there, knowing that we would get our needs met was huge.”
Take a look at mk North America’s instance of Variant called CAD360 on their website to configure your own conveyor today!
Products Used
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Variant
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Implementation
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Training
