LIXIL

With a global enterprise across 150 countries, LIXIL is a Japan-based maker of water and housing products, including kitchens, bathrooms, toilets, showers, faucets, washbins, doors, windows, and interior building materials such as flooring and storage furniture. LIXIL owns some of the industry's most trusted names, including GROHE and American Standard.

The Challenge: low scalability of the drawing function delays proposing work to end users

LIXIL developed and operated an automated CAD engine, or ACE, a drafting system that rapidly processed drawings for various kitchen and bathroom products. As the demand for LIXIL products grew, sales and marketing teams plugged in thousands of requests for product drawings daily and there were often processing delays during times when there were many requests. Therefore, scalability was required for the system. In addition, when a failure occurs, it takes time to recover, and productivity decreases while waiting for the return of drawings. In addition to solving the above issues, LIXIL needed to improve drawing speed in order to handle more than 30,000 users per day.

The APS Solution: achieving scalability and speed with a cloud-based drawing system

Eyeing future business expansion, LIXIL planned a move to the cloud using Autodesk Platform Services in order to be more scalable and responsive to the anticipated increase in requests. 

ACE uses the Data Management API to centrally manage the files required for drawing on the cloud. Your job is simple. After creating a product quote, with the click of a button, ACE can create drawings with the Design Automation for AutoCAD API and get drawings instantly. With the entire workflow in the cloud and the automated drafting powered by Autodesk APIs, drafting time was reduced by 15%.

For the most complex drawings, the time savings double to 30%.  ACE requires less labor and infrastructure, so LIXIL has also cut costs in the realm of $100,000 per year.  In addition, even on a day when the number of requests was twice as high as usual, they were able to create drawings without reducing processing capacity. This enables LIXIL's system to keep up with the demand of its growing business, delivering high-quality drawings and quotes to its customers faster.

Business Outcomes: efficiencies and scalability

• Drafting time reduced by 15% for all requests and by 30% for complex drawings
• Labor and infrastructure savings of approximately $100,000 per year
• Scalable solution that can serve 30,000 daily users and grow
• Microservices enabled for automated drafting processes, improving response, scalability, and quality

APIs and Services

Data Management API

Design Automation API for AutoCAD