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.

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

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. Every time the CAD was rebuilt from scratch;
2. The process was vaguely defined and resulted in costly human errors;
3. Design for manufacturing was simple yet fully manual and slow;

We solved the these problems by:

• Helping to define the design process;
• Structuring the CAD into multiple parametric reusable templates;
• Programatically linking the parametric designs into one single workflow;
• Developing a CAD plugin which guides the designer through the whole workflow and asks for input only where necessary;
• Automating the creation of manufacturing designs and their publishing to the shop floor operators.

Which resulted in:

• 100% elimination of human errors;
• Reduction of the design process from 8 hours to 30 min;
• Simplification of manufacturing by preparing standardized order documents;
• Ensuring quality by having explicit design review steps;
• Simplifying the designer on-boarding process by reducing the skill-requirements;
• Allowing the company to do Agile design alongside production;

Our cooperation resulted in substantial reduction of design costs and prepared the company to scale to many more orders. Furthermore, Eekual were able to make significantly improve their production rate, minimize resource wastage. Furthermore, embedded Agile principles lead to a much more rapid design improvements and simpler addition of new products lines.

As part of our engagement, Eekual achieved the following outcomes:

• Design time reduction of >95% (from 2 days to 30 minutes per shoe pair)
• Reduced personalized design costs by 90%
• Lead time reduction of >80% (from 2 weeks to 2 days per order)
• Enabled Eekual to easily add new shoe designs into the workflow