Waiblingen, Germany
February 26, 2008

ANDREAS STIHL AG & Co. KG the world leader in chainsaw power tools, has deployed MechWorks DBWorks Enterprise product data management software to streamline its global engineering collaboration program. With DBWorks Enterprise, STIHL has full control of Tools, Dies and special machines CAD data, modeled with SolidWorks®, gaining significant time savings by distributing information globally.

STIHL is headquartered in Waiblingen Germany, developing and manufacturing an extensive range of petrol and electric outdoor power tools. The company has tool design offices and production sites located worldwide and the need to work concurrently and share designs and data of production facilities between them.

With DBWorks Enterprise Geographically Distributed Environment STIHL is sharing data between international tool design offices and production sites of Germany and Switzerland (USA and Others coming next) giving real-time feedback on changes made on each site. Automatic and on demand file transfers ensure that design changes are carried across all referencing documents.

STIHL is managing hundreds of thousands parts, assemblies and drawings as well as other manufacturing documents in its DBWorks Enterprise system.

In addition to the DBWorks Enterprise Geographically Distributed Environment STIHL has also implemented the DBWorks Web Client to publish the design documentation present in the DBWorks system on the web. Shop floor and plant maintenance personnel have access to DBWorks data through the thin client interface. Coupled with the Geographically Distributed Environment shop-floor workers have a chance to view the replicated documents from all sites.

"We have significantly improved our data consistency and productivity by deploying DBWorks Enterprise," said Günther Waibel, STIHL Staff Manager CAD/CAM Consulting. "We’re enabling our design engineers, and other personnel to always have the right design within reach".

"STIHL has a worldwide organization structure that relies on efficient sharing of information across continents and within each plant” said Gaetano Tavano, MechWorks co-founder. "DBWorks Enterprise enables companies like STIHL, to accomplish this with a sizable benefit and a low implementation cost."