Customer Background

1. Customer Background • Krebs Engineers is a 50-year old, 160-person company based in Tucson, Arizona, with additional offices in Australia, Brazil, Chile, Austria, South Africa and the Philippines. Krebs is a leading supplier of centrifugal separators (hydrocyclones) and a line of slurry pumps known as millMAX. • Business Challenges • A proliferation of documents, coupled with an outmoded manual document handling system. • Slow response times to customer inquiries and RFQs. • Time spent searching for documents was reducing the time available to spend designing the 20% of every product that is custom-engineered for the client’s particular needs. • Solution Implementation • CATIA V5 for 3D CAD. CATIA’s multi-CAD capabilities also make it perfect to access and work with Krebs’ 2D CAD documents. • SMARTEAM to manage all product design and document files from CATIA and the company’s 2D CAD system, allowing rapid search and retrieval of documents and clear tracking of various document versions. • SMARTEAM's SmartWeb to make all of the company’s documents available to employees worldwide over the Internet using a standard Web browser. • Benefits of the Solution • Reduced response time for RFQs from one week to one day, on average • Improved competitiveness from being first to respond to client inquiries with a more complete proposal for a better product in a fraction of the time of competitors • Time spent searching for documents can now be spent on improving the 20% of each product that is custom-designed to meet specific customer needs • All employees have access to all information and the most recent versions of information, from all company locations using a simple Web browser

2. First with the best wins the race Krebs Engineers has no doubt its products are better than the competition’s, and it has the documentation to prove it. But being the best doesn’t always win the job unless you can also respond in a timely manner to customer requests for information. See how CATIA V5 and SMARTEAM are helping Krebs be first as well as best and win a larger share of the jobs on which it bids. “We are not yet using SMARTEAM to its potential. We’ve just scratched the surface. What it will do is to allow us to respond more quickly and accurately to the client. Our true competitive advantage is our intellectual capability, and if we can demonstrate that to the customer tomorrow instead of next week, it pulls us out of the pack and puts us into the lead.” – Stuart Sandler, Director of Information Services, Krebs Engineers