Creo Customer: Exmark Cuts Down Product Line Redundancies

By Geoff Hedges | Published: August 11, 2011

It’s August. We’re in the thick of the grass-growing season, and I’ve just realized my lawn mower is lame. First of all, I have to manually pull a cord to start the engine. It’s forever dripping oil. And there’s no place to sit.

Now, check out the mowers from Creo customer Lazer Z. I’m especially interested in the Pioneer with its pneumatic caster wheels, coil spring suspension, and low center of gravity for superior traction. It cuts almost 30 acres in an hour, and it’s got arm rests!
But we’re here to talk about design software.

The Lazer Z Pioneer is manufactured by Exmark, and it’s one of almost 40 models the company produces, including a recent line of energy efficient mowers. The company designs it equipment using Creo Parametric.

Until recently, Exmark produced each of its product families separately.  “Our product lines had been developed over more than a decade and included similar parts that had been redesigned from scratch to accomplish the same task,” says Steve Finkner, Senior Engineering Manager at Exmark.

All that has changed. The company redesigned the entire product line, basing all of its mowers on a single assembly model. That’s where Creo Parametric comes in. Exmark now builds its models off a single parametric model. All the parts and assemblies common to other models are “overloaded” into the basic assembly. Everything else is simplified. Now when a common part changes, it’s reflected quickly in all the new models.

That one process improvement has unlocked value for the Exmark team, more than tripling the number of parts common to all its designs. It’s cut design time in half, which in turn has led to more models on the market faster. Watch for Exmark Manufacturing and its Lazer Z turf equipment in this episode of The Product Design Show.