Engineer-to-order manufacturing
Let CADTALK get your systems talking, so your engineers do the work they were hired to do.
The Problem
Engineer-to-order manufacturing is already hard. Every job is a little different. Every quote needs new drawings, new part numbers, new routings. Your ERP runs the business once that data lands inside it. Getting it there is still on your engineers.
Here's what actually happens.
The design gets finalized in SolidWorks, Inventor, AutoCAD, Creo, Solid Edge, or another major CAD platform. Then someone (probably an engineer) opens the ERP and starts typing. Part numbers. BOM structure. Routings. Item masters. By the time an order ships, your most expensive technical talent has spent hours re-entering data that already existed the moment the design was done.
Ask around your engineering team. You'll hear some version of, I didn't go to school for data entry. They're right. And every hour they spend re-keying a BOM that already exists in CAD is an hour they're not spending on the design work you hired them for.
The real cost of the manual handoff
In ETO environments, this happens on every job, every quote, every engineering change order. Three things tend to happen:
Errors Compound Downstream
A wrong part number in the BOM becomes a wrong part on the shop floor, which becomes a schedule slip, which becomes a customer call no one wants to make.
One Person Becomes the Whole Process
The engineer who "just knows how to do it" goes on vacation, and suddenly no one's quite sure how the BOM gets into the ERP correctly.
Every Downstream ERP Function Assumes Accurate Data
Scheduling, planning, and costing all depend on a correct bill of material. When that data arrives late or wrong, the ripple shows up fast, and it shows up expensive.
ERPs are strong systems, built for exactly this kind of complexity. The gap is what feeds them.
A Different Data Pipeline
CADTALK reads the approved design straight out of your CAD or PLM environment and writes it into your ERP, structured and production-ready. It's configurable, not custom. The rules live in an engine your team can inspect, so an ERP upgrade doesn't break it.
The rules your engineers have always applied (which parts get which routings, how variants get numbered, when a component needs a new revision) get captured once, in a system the whole team can see. That's what changes. The knowledge moves out of one person's head and into a process everyone can trust.
A 10-engineer team recovers roughly $234K a year in engineering capacity, sees lead times drop 80%, and hits payback in 2 to 4 months. In production environments, not a demo.
Built for How ETO Actually Works
CADTALK already runs inside IFS, Infor CSI, and SYSPRO environments, handling the exact pattern engineer-to-order manufacturers deal with daily: high mix, frequent engineering changes, configured products that don't fit a static BOM template. If you're running one of these ERPs alongside SolidWorks, Inventor, AutoCAD, Creo, Solid Edge, Tekla, EPLAN, Altium, or another supported CAD, PDM, or PLM system (including SolidWorks PDM, Autodesk Vault, PTC Windchill, Siemens Teamcenter, Arena PLM, or Dassault Enovia 3DX), this is the gap CADTALK was built to close.
Your engineers get their time back. Your ERP gets the data it needs to actually do its job. And the next order doesn't wait on someone finding a spare hour to type it in.
See what the handoff looks like automated for your CAD and ERP combination.
The fastest way to know what CADTALK does for your shop is to watch it run against your CAD and your ERP. Prefer to talk to someone first? sales@cadtalk.com
