Opportunity

Eekual bionic GmbH designs, develops, manufactures personalized shoes. Via the app, a customer makes images of their feet and measurements are extracted using an algorithm to create perfectly fitting sneakers made exactly for the wearer. The company sells its products through their app and ships them worldwide. Eekual bionic GmbH was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in Cologne, Germany.

The Challenge

Production capacity and production cost had become a limiting factor for growth to the business. Product was sold at a loss and lead times were as long as 2 weeks per order. The business had challenges in delivering the product due to:

• Manual and complex design workflow
• Digital build mistakes and high cost of fixing them
• Manual process tracking
• Loosely defined production process

Solution

For Eekual to launch and grow profitable, they required to lower production cost and optimize production process. We initiated our engagement by evaluating the current state of operations and identifying numerous potential areas for improvement. We identified the following as main pain problems:

1. Shoe design preparations for manufacturing. Shoe designer had to manually review each order, make adjustments to shoe designs to accommodate wearer's feet's.
2. Human errors in designs were causing material and time wastage.

We solved the these problems by implementing a plugin to the CAD software which automated all the repeatable steps with specific checkpoints for manual fine-tuning. This gave the following advantages:

• Standardize and speed up the design workflow;
• Significantly reduced human errors in digital models;
• Made the design process traceable and always up to date;

Results

Eekual were able to make significantly improve their production rate and minimize resource wastage.As part of our engagement, Eekual achieved the following outcomes:

• Design time reduction of 97% (from 2 days to 30 minutes per shoe pair)
• Reduced personalised design costs by 90%
• Lead time reduction of 86% (from 2 weeks to 2 days per order)
• Enabled Eekual to easily add new shoe designs into the workflow