Case Study: MAN Truck & Bus AG achieves streamlined parts management with CADENAS PARTsolutions

Partsolutions icon PARTsolutions is the central tool for managing MAN parts and is in use at 1,300+ workstations worldwide

MAN Truck & Bus AG, one of Europe’s leading commercial vehicle manufacturers, needed a better way to manage a vast and fragmented parts environment across multiple locations and CAD systems. Existing parts management did not cover the full parts base, interfaces between systems were limited, and not all sites could access the same tools. CADENAS PARTsolutions was introduced to simplify the finding, reduction, and management of CAD parts, especially during engineering and design.

CADENAS implemented PARTsolutions step by step across MAN’s global sites, connecting CATIA V4/V5 and Autodesk Inventor, PDM and ERP systems, and internal document archives while adding geometric similarity search and automated classification. The solution helped MAN find, reuse, and avoid duplicate parts earlier in development, improved data consistency, and increased part retrievability for engineers and purchasers. By 2010, it supported around 270,000 parts and was deployed at hundreds of workstations across MAN locations, delivering faster searches, more reuse of standard and supplier parts, and lower costs through reduced part proliferation.

MAN Truck & Bus AG

Alexander Reuter

IT Department Head, CAx Applications