Toshiba International × CADDi — Turning engineering data into an asset procurement and cost can use
In engineer-to-order work the engineering, procurement and production conditions change with every project. What is missing is not actions but the information layer between them — above all the inability to trace how engineering data (drawings, specifications, BOMs, change history) propagates into procurement, production and cost. That one layer is our part. Replacing planning or scheduling is not.
The Challenge
Delivery, procurement and change. All three come back to engineering data being out of reach at the moment of decision.
Engineering is the early critical path, and delivery slips
A requested date becomes the schedule without checking capacity or material lead time; a late specification freeze and late drawing and BOM release turn straight into late orders for long-lead parts. The delay surfaces downstream, in the supplier metric and on the floor, so the stage at which it arose cannot be measured.
Custom fabrication is the constraint, and no alternative can be readied quickly
Build-to-print sheet metal, machining and castings are the main constraint and are largely single-sourced. Finding, quoting and approving an alternative takes time, and the day is taken up expediting. The number of parts and suppliers is past what can be covered one at a time.
Changes are frequent, and neither their cost nor their origin is visible
Specification changes, design changes, substitutions and end-of-life events are frequent, but the delivery, inventory, scrap and rework cost before and after a change are not managed together, so root cause cannot be separated. The floor's view that 60–80% of manufacturing problems start upstream has not been verified against cause codes.
All three come back to the same gap: past designs, drawings, changes and purchase records cannot be reached at the moment of decision. The design configurator addresses 10–20% of the range; for the remaining 80–90% of custom work, closing this gap is the only route.
The current workflow, and how it changes
Enquiry to shipment in five steps, with the current state and what changes side by side. Every figure on the right is measured on received data and can be opened in the screen named.
Enquiry and delivery promise
Today
The requested date is promised without checking capacity, material lead time or design load. What a similar past project specified, and what went wrong on it, is whatever the owner remembers.
What changes
Creating the project lists past orders of equivalent specification with the evidence shown. Their change history, BOM and procurement risk are on one screen, so “what happened last time we built this” is answerable before the promise is made.
Fixing the specification and choosing the baseline
Today
Past designs, drawings, reasons for change and test results are scattered, so a reusable design cannot be found. Special requirements exist only in prose, spelled several ways.
What changes
One search reads both the prose and the structure and ranks similar machines. Spelling variants are absorbed and requirements that exist only in prose become filters. How the baseline was chosen -- sentence, filters, candidates, models compared -- is recorded on the project.
Drawing and BOM release
Today
“Design complete” and “procurable” are not separated, so long-lead parts are ordered late and superseded parts get bought and stocked.
What changes
The BOM is expanded level by level with long lead time, end of life, no purchase history and lifecycle deadlines on the part row. The baseline's BOM opens in one click and is set against another model, counting what is identical, at a different level, a different quantity, missing or added.
Ordering and choosing the source
Today
The supply structure of the custom parts cannot be seen at a glance, so where the single-sourcing sits is unknown, and buying near-identical parts from two suppliers at two prices goes unnoticed.
What changes
Of 1,292 purchased lines, the 455 built to a TIC drawing are shown as a supply structure across 35 suppliers with single-sourcing, SCM exceptions and lead time in one table, plus 113 concrete “move this part onto that one” pairs with the gap, the quantity and both drawings.
A change is raised, and propagates
Today
Where a change lands in procurement, inventory, production and delivery cannot be traced, and a change that keeps repeating goes unnoticed.
What changes
All 1,937 real change records are matched to machines, orders and BOM parts, so a change touching a part in the machine is shown as relevant to it. Severity, occurrence and detection are derived from the text by rule, an action priority computed, and changes roll up by failure mode with the original wording one click away.
Priority themes and what we offer
What we propose for each theme. Everything listed already runs on the data we have received.
| P | Theme | What we propose |
|---|---|---|
P1 | Drawing and specification data as a reusable asset Spec Explore / Projects | Full-text plus structured search, ranked similar machines, spelling variants absorbed, filters derived from prose, the basis of a choice kept on record |
P1 | Optimising custom-fabrication procurement Procurement Explore / Opportunity Finder | 455 build-to-print parts across 35 suppliers, 338 single-sourced, and 113 consolidation pairs with the gap, quantity and both drawings |
P1 | Checking cost validity, and design-driven cost BOM Explore / Opportunity Finder | What the combination of a part's specification (material, size, tolerance, finish, lot) and its price does to cost. Inside a group of equivalents the specification differences and the price differences are shown side by side, so which attribute is moving the cost can be seen |
P2 | Tracking the impact of a change Spec Explore / ECN/ECR Dashboard | At proposal and design time, what changes and failures this configuration has drawn before, so the cause is held down in advance. All 1,937 change records are matched to machines, orders and BOM parts, rolled up by failure mode and drilled through to the original text |
P2 | End-to-end visibility and common KPIs Projects | A nine-step project status and the search history -- the minimum milestone management needed to define the backlog split from data |
Data Inventory (Received Data)
All data received from TIC (120 files). Of the five delivery categories, 04_Manufacturing & quality trouble and 05_Identification & linkage master arrived empty and are still outstanding. The PoC was validated on the procurement and change data of both the drive and motor businesses. After contract (Phase 2), the full dataset starting with Drive extends coverage to the drawings, the trouble records and the linkage master.
| File / Folder | Category | Records | Use | Phase |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01_Drawings & product definition | Drawings | 54 files | VFD/PAC schematics & assembly drawings (PDF) | P2 — Post-Contract |
| 02_BOM_AS34200KAA | BOM | 288 parts | LV Drive structure | P1 — Live |
| 02_BOM_M44AN44400AAA0 | BOM | 1,598 parts | MV Drive structure | P1 — Live |
| 02_BOM_PAC4A11TN | BOM | 315 parts | PAC structure | P1 — Live |
| 02_Sales Order Acks (4 files) | BOM | 4 PDF | Customer required specs | P2 — Post-Contract |
| 03_CP-PEP ECN/ECR | ECN/ECR | 387 | Drive division change history | P1 — Live |
| 03_MP ECN/ECR | ECN/ECR | 1,550 | Motor division change history | P1 — Live |
| 03_Drawings revised by ECN | ECN/ECR | 53 PDF | Mechanical/electrical drawings post-ECN | P2 — Post-Contract |
| 04_Manufacturing & quality trouble | Quality | not received | Once received: test reports, claims and replacements attached to orders, machines, BOM parts and change documents | P2 — Post-Contract |
| 05_Identification & linkage master | Master | not received | Once received: part number to drawing number (the 408 numbers the BOMs name match no drawing in Drawer today) | P2 — Post-Contract |
| Drawer_link | Drawings | 8 links | Links to the per-order document sets in Drawer | P1 — Live |
| Buyer Planned Orders 04-16-26 | Procurement | 8,902 | Plans, suppliers, lead times | P1 — Live |
| SCM Exception Messages 04-15-26 | Procurement | 11,282 | Reschedule, cancel, delay | P1 — Live |
Update Information
The requests received, grouped by the department that raised them. Items with no change are not listed. Generated data is labelled DEMO / SAMPLE on the screens themselves.
| No | Request | What was built |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Grow the sample corpus so a full-text search of the Special Instructions for e.g. “touch screen” ranks by similarity, and label the generated records. |
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| 2 | The touch-screen search was wrong: the sentence search found cases the Option filter could not narrow. Determine whether the data or the logic was at fault. |
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| 3 | From the BOM comparison a part could not be opened in its drawing or source data. Generated drawings to be considered if none exist. |
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| 4 | BOM comparison: when the same part sits at more than one level, only one appeared, so the specification could not be read. |
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| 5 | Instructions written as a reference (“same as SO#129896”). It risks complicating the UI, and an input rule is an alternative. |
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| No | Request | What was built |
|---|---|---|
| 9 | (1) Find parts that should be consolidated (a door differing only in hole count, bought elsewhere). (2) Make custom-part suppliers visible. (3) Estimate volumes such as electrical steel from the drawings. |
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| No | Request | What was built |
|---|---|---|
| 8 | Quality (new). Oracle’s quality data is unreliable so the floor keeps spreadsheets, and quality is not connected to change. Test reports, replacements and claims should be searchable together. |
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| No | Request | What was built |
|---|---|---|
| 11 | Add Projects, Spec Explore and BOM Explore to Motor with the same layout and output as Drive, using generated data grounded in the drawings where none exists. |
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