SBIR Success Story-HDP

SBIR Success Story: BIMCON Inc.

37814 Ellerly Lane

Northville, MI48167

Contact: Krishna Murthy

Phone: 248-875-6591

E-Mail:  kmurthy [at] bimcon.com (kmurthy[at]bimcon[dot]com)

Project Title: Decision Support Tools for Sustainable Manufacturing

NIST Award:SB1341-11-CN-0086

Technology Developed: BIMCON has developed several key components of a decision support framework for sustainability assessment, assisted by multiple Small Business Innovation and Research (SBIR) grants from National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This framework provides the model and approach for enabling sustainable product designs using tools to rapidly cascade attribute targets throughout the entire Bill of Material. One of its many unique features is that its extensible architectural foundations apply uniformly to all product attributes, individually and collectively, and provides the ability to manage several attributes in one dashboard. BIMCON is now looking forward to commercializing this technology that is crucial to every company's desire to effectively manage sustainability requirements. 

Benefit to Company: The SBIR awards enabled BIMCON to bring together a team of experts and work on a previously un-attempted problem of significant industrial value. As BIMCON completed primary Phase 2 deliverables, it has acquired funding from Ford Motor Company that uses BIMCON's BOM & PLM core expertise, along with techniques developed through this project, and apply it to standardize the product function within the Automobile vehicle structure and integrate it with the Corporate PLM system. The pilot that will be is scheduled to end in 2015 and considers 5 small subsystems. The longer term plan, beyond 2016 relying on the success of the pilot, is to expand this work to the entire vehicle BOM and across all programs and the entire Engineering Design ecosystem. BIMCON has recently advertised for an opening to hire 2 skilled engineers to work in this area. 

Impact to Company Growth: Tactical, Strategic. 

How Product Was Commercialized: Part of the work is being commercialized right away because of the way this project was planned and executed. BIMCON has the unique opportunity of entering the market immediately as some of the components of this work have immediate need in the automotive industry. The foundational work has components that BIMCON aims to quickly apply to near-term problems in the industry. At the same time, BIMCON looks forward to now expand its portfolio to sustainability-related tool development and commercialization as a part of its longer-term strategies. 

1. The foundational research has components for immediate commercialization. BIMCON plans to launch new BOM-based products and services, not considered within the SBIR work. For example, BIMCON is currently leveraging this work in its latest project funded by Ford Motor Company.
2. BIMCON is also ready to enter market for sustainable target management. The NIST-SBIR program enabled BIMCON develop and test an idea and thus enter the Sustainable manufacturing market with proven technology.

Past R&D and/or Sales from this Project: $200K

Estimated Future Annual R&D and/or Sales from this Project: $1M to $5M per year over the next few years.