Case Study: Milwaukee Tool achieves instant global CAD collaboration and $40K annual storage savings with Panzura Freedom Collaboration

Milwaukee Tool Reduces Time to Market, Increases Agility

Milwaukee Tool, a 100-year-old manufacturer with more than 1,000 employees across 18 U.S. and China locations, was struggling to collaborate on large CAD and high‑speed video files. Network latency (250–300 ms) made file opens take 30–40 minutes or longer, teams frequently overwrote or merged conflicting versions, and on‑premises storage costs were high, even forcing staff to ship DVDs between offices.

The company deployed Panzura Freedom Collaboration with distributed element‑level file locking, intelligent caching and Amazon cloud storage. Files that once took minutes or hours now open in seconds, version conflicts are eliminated, DVDs are gone, and storage costs fell dramatically (about $630/month for ~20 TB, under $0.04/GB), freeing on‑premises capacity while improving productivity, security and employee morale.

Milwaukee Tool

Alan Musser

Supervisor of Systems Engineering Team