When DESTACO, one of the world’s leading suppliers of high-performance automation, workholding and containment solutions, needed a new product configuration solution, they chose CDS Visual. To find out why – and how CDS Visual helped DESTACO improve their eCommerce – we interviewed Darren Greene, Global Director, Marketing and Business Intelligence for DESTACO.
Could you please tell us a bit more about DESTACO?
Sure! DESTACO is an industrial automation provider. If there’s an assembly line, you are likely to find our products on it. We serve virtually every industry – from pharma to automotive and anything in between.
Our company was founded in 1915 as the Detroit Stamping Company, to serve the rapidly growing auto industry with contract stamping as well as die and machining services. Today, we are a family of companies that includes Robohand gripping solutions, Camco indexers and Central Research Laboratories (CRL) remote handling equipment. We are a global manufacturer, with about 800 employees in13 locations. And, of course, we are a Dover company, which adds the strength of being part of a diversified global manufacturer with annual revenue of approximately $7 billion.
What led you to consider a new eCommerce visualization solution?
At DESTACO, our products are designed into assembly lines. With a catalog of products that runs into the thousands, and includes extremely specialized products, our customers need to be able to ensure that our parts will fit into their engineering schematics. So, CAD modeling is simply essential, and they need to be high-fidelity, reliable CAD models. While we do have some standard, off-the-shelf products, our eCommerce strategy is also highly dependent on Configured-to-Order (CTO) and Engineered-to-Order (ETO) sales. If we can’t provide that capability, we will lose sales.
We had been using a different solution provider for years, but wanted to see if we could improve our performance and add essential features like parametric search, CAD and engineering file downloads – and of course, 3D configuration. We chose CDS because they were able to provide all of that to us. We have been working together for about 6 years now, and we couldn’t be happier.
What made CDS Visual stand out?
We had been using one of the other big players in the visualization industry, but when we began to engage with CDS we quickly saw a huge advantage. First off—the difference in cost was incredible. With CDS, we were able to get more capabilities and better performance at literally less than half the cost.
In addition, CDS Visual was incredibly flexible. While other providers are offering off-the-shelf implementation with a “take it or leave it” attitude, CDS customized their solutions exactly to our needs. We never heard the word “no” when we worked with CDS Visual. They were able to build our modeling solutions exactly the way we wanted them to be—from their appearance to the options our customers were able to interact with. It was amazing.
While we initially began working with CDS on a few product lines, things went so well that we quickly migrated our entire eCommerce site over to CDS technology.
Are there other ways that CDS Visual helps?
Yes! While we had been using pretty manual methods for managing our data, CDS was able to implement an online catalog solution that we were able to use on our site. While before, customers would need to just navigate through lists and tables that they would need to go through basically by hand, we are now a modern, searchable catalog that empowers our customers to quickly find what they are looking for. CDS even helped us define our product taxonomy, to ensure it was highly searchable and optimized to the user journey.
Ready to see how CDS Visual can help your company improve its CAD modeling and product searchability? Contact us today for your complimentary consultation.
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