Bowstone CEO Keynote Speaker in Las Vegas

In his keynote address at the Siemens conference in Las Vegas, Steve Bowker, CEO of Bowstone Metal Fabricators, shared his company’s transformative journey with ZEL X. Steve highlighted the challenges of transitioning from traditional processes to a disciplined, software-driven approach that allows for easy collaboration. This, paired with the company’s ISO 2015:9001 certification, has led to significant improvements in efficiency, precision, communication, and customer satisfaction. By adopting this new system, Bowstone achieved remarkable on-time delivery rates and substantial growth, solidifying their competitive edge in the industry.

Complete Transcript of Keynote Speech

John: Let’s hear from a Solid Edge customer who recently adopted ZEL X and is achieving success. I’d like to introduce Steve Bowker, CEO of Bowstone Metal Fabricators.

[Applause]

John: Let’s give Steven a welcome.

Steve: Thank you, John. Hi, everybody. I’m Steve Bowker, the CEO of Bowstone Metal Fabrication. Bowstone Metal Fabrication is a contract manufacturer. We like to go after high-volume customers versus the one-off customers, better known as “snowflakes.” The reason being is that the snowflakes always want something for free, and you have the same amount of setup time and collaboration throughout the whole process, whether it’s a snowflake or a high-volume customer.

We make a wide variety of products, from small plastic parts to large weldments. We’ve made parts for the Empire State Building, including the door handles. We made 250,000 straps for Walmart that hold their display cases in place. We’ve also made gas tanks for the Superbike series and a bunch of other custom parts. The one thing all these parts have in common is they were intended to be made in high volume. But that doesn’t always work out, and that’s where we try to focus our business.

So, I’m new to this whole slide thing. That was the slide. Anyway, our challenges were Bowstone 1.0. As we strove to reach our goals of huge growth and high margins, our mission was repeatedly slapped down due to internal errors. For one reason or another, we consistently missed delivery dates and quality objectives. I’m sure everybody here is familiar with that. When you’re dealing with humans, it happens. We knew we had to do something different.

With the current staff and processes, we just knew that they weren’t going to make it. They weren’t capable. We knew that we had to add discipline and some kind of software to keep track of things. That’s when we decided to go for our ISO 9001 certification and implemented ZEL X to manage new projects and onboard new customers. This way, we didn’t have the pain point of onboarding a new customer and then making another mistake.

We completed our ISO certification, and we got rid of some staff who, despite being great people, were never going to be able to adapt to the changes. Change is the hardest thing for anybody. We really struggled with that. We decided that we needed to roll out ZEL X across the entire company. This way, we could monitor manufacturing in real-time. If a customer contacted us, we could answer their questions immediately, which is crucial for maintaining a professional and competent image.

In March, we had an on-time delivery rate of 99.8%, and in April, we reached 100% for over 200,000 parts. This didn’t happen magically. It took a lot of effort and pain until we got to Bowstone 2.0. Over the last three years, we’ve grown at least 50%, which has been very challenging. But now, things are much smoother. We have the disciplines from the ISO certification and the procedures to correct issues moving forward.

With ZEL X, we share designs with customers, who can approve and mark them up in real-time. This has improved our collaboration with vendors, customers, and employees. ZEL X allows for targeted communication, so only the relevant people are involved, reducing unnecessary emails and improving efficiency.

In summary, ZEL X gives us enhanced efficiency, improved precision, seamless integration with our CAD/CAM systems, scalability, cost savings, the ability to make data-driven decisions, and most importantly, it makes us competitive. I would like to thank the ZEL X team. You guys rock. Appreciate it very much.

[Applause]

John: Great job. Thank you so much, Steve.