You may already know that China consumes more petroleum than it extracts from within its own borders. In fact, in fall 2013, the country became the world’s largest importer of crude, surpassing US numbers for the first time ever.
What might surprise you is that the country is a significant producer of oil too. Until the 1990s, China was a global exporter of the fossil fuel. And today, it remains one of the top 5 producers in the world, generating more than 4 million barrels a day.
With all that extraction activity comes demand for specialized oil well products—liner hangers, stage collars, cementing heads, expandable profiled pipe, etc. Each in a variety of sizes, lengths, pressure ratings, and weights.
Click on the Image to see a Line Hanger Animation
For the past 30 years Shelfoil Petroleum Equipment & Services has engineered and manufactured those downhole tools from its facilities in Dezhou, in the eastern province of Shandong. Today, the company is the industry leader and supplies most Chinese onshore and offshore oilfields. Plus, it exports its products to 30 countries worldwide—including the US, Canada, and Russia.
Shelfoil Products
How does it keep track of all those products and variants? Since 2008, Shelfoil has enlisted PTC solutions. The company uses PTC Windchill PDMLink and PTC Creo for its product development environment, including design, data management, and collaboration.
PTC Windchill PDMLink is a web-based product data management repository, so it can easily track product models and drawings, their variants, and old revisions. Moreover, team members anywhere can access the information easily. Best of all, it prevents expensive design errors by controlling and automating the typically chaotic product development processes—for example, by adding change management.
The data management software works seamlessly with PTC Creo Parametric, as well as PTC Creo Direct and PTC Creo View MCAD. As such, designs can be quickly retrieved, edited, reviewed, vaulted, and revisioned all from within the CAD tools.
The result?
The company reports that production costs have gone down and product data is more effectively managed. With the solution, it’s easier to solve modeling problems and check for interferences, even for non-CAD experts.
“PTC integrated solutions provide a reliable guarantee for our R&D,” says Jiang Xiangdong, general manager.
Ed – by deploying both CAD and PDM, PTC customers are gaining significant advantage in product development – want to know more? Explore and share our growing collection of customer stories.
