Bobst Group

Bobst Group is the world’s leading supplier of equipment and services to packaging manufacturers in the folding carton, corrugated board and flexible material industries. Its mission is to enable its clients to provide reliable and attractive packaging that is eco-friendly and cost-effective.

The Group is composed of over thirty companies around the globe including Bobst, Asitrade, Martin, Fischer & Krecke, General, Kocksiek, and Rotomec. Each company designs, develops, and manufactures its own products that are adapted to a wide variety of local conditions and market preferences. Headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland, the Group is also present in France, Italy, England and Germany and has manufacturing and assembly facilities in Brazil, China and India.

One of Bobst Group’s most significant business challenges is to adapt its industrial processes and organization to better face rapidly increasing competition and market changes. At the same time, the company must ensure that these internal changes do not adversely affect the quality of its products or the high quality of service to which its customers have grown accustomed.

The Group focused its efforts on implementing an IT strategy with the objective of simplifying and standardizing all its 2D drawing solutions. “We had deployed a variety of 2D solutions over the years but were increasingly faced with DWG data exchange problems that arose when colleagues didn’t use the same software,” said Marcel H. Gerber, VPLM competency center manager for Bobst worldwide. “We therefore decided to implement a unique solution on one platform so that employees all over the world can communicate and exchange 2D information.”

The solution Bobst Group opted for is DraftSight, Dassault Systèmes’ no-cost, intuitive and powerful 2D solution for creating, editing and viewing DWG files. DraftSight thus became the unique and standard tool for technical 2D drawings for the entire Bobst Group. “DWG files are the most popular file format for 2D CAD data in the world,” said Thanh Canh Pham, project manager, Bobst Group VPLM competency center. “It was only natural that we choose a solution that processes this format natively and renders DWG data incompatibility issues a thing of the past. And the fact that DraftSight is free was also a determining factor.”

DraftSight runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux and is available for CAD professionals, educators and students to download at DraftSight.com. In the twelve months that followed DraftSight’s launch in June 2010, there have been more than 825,000 downloads. “The principle departments within the Bobst Group that will use DraftSight are those that provide sales support for our machines where DraftSight is used to create installation diagrams and those whose employees provide maintenance to our installed base,” said Gerber.

Bobst selected DraftSight’s Premium Service Pack, which is a bundle of services that includes telephone and email support, a network license, and access to DraftSight APIs and API updates. “We opted for this package for two reasons,” said Gerber. “One is for license management for future product updates and the second, which is important to Bobst, is to have an API library so that we can port our existing applications to the systems we have set up.” Gerber had very positive feedback from DraftSight users from the very first day it was deployed. “We are very satisfied with our choice of DraftSight and with the partnership we have with Dassault Systèmes. It has enabled us to accomplish what we set out to do - implement a unique and standard solution that responds to our need to create and exchange 2D geometry.”

“By improving the quality of our products and technical support for the installed base, the DraftSight project is completely in line with resolving the challenges of the company.”