From Family Farm to Global Success

Kelly Engineering, an award-winning manufacturer and exporter of agricultural chains, tillage implements and trailers, knew they needed to move away from their paper-based way of working, which they felt was lacking speed and efficiency and hindering their business growth.

With plans including a contract manufacturer in the US and a European office, the proudly family-based business were on the way to significantly expanding and developing its markets under the leadership of CEO, Shane Kelly and Engineering Manager, Roger Dunlop, but knew changes were required to help them make this transition quickly and seamlessly.

“We needed transparency across the business in terms of the design and development process,” Roger says, “That meant improved communication here and with our international partners. We also wanted a faster way to manage the engineering change process.”

With the help of Central Innovation’s end-to-end software and hardware solutions, Kelly Engineering was able to address the rigour and challenges of international expansion. With SOLIDWORKS Premium they boosted their design capabilities, then expanded into a total ERP solution, synchronising design data with SOLIDWORKS PDM. SOLIDWORKS Composer was introduced for product communication and with the power of Central Innovation’s IC3D Workstations they were able to run it all more efficiently than they were previously.

“We can now deliver data across the business in a seamless way. Whenever we make a change to the product, we can communicate it to the rest of the business, and feed input back into the design,” Roger says.

Central Innovation’s long history in the manufacturing industry meant that the solution was surprisingly quick to implement. “Central Innovation had a good understanding of our business and industry best-practice. We were up and running very rapidly.”

Kelly Engineering plans to continue to draw on Central Innovation’s complete suite of solutions – from software to hardware, consulting to training. “Next, we’re looking to automate how we load costing information and product images.” Roger says.