Delphi to spread CAD improvement in Europe this year

Delphi Technologies, the IP subsidiary of automotive giant Delphi, has appointed CADVenture, CADPo and Scate Technologies in the US to provide training and sales for its CAD/CAM methodologies – and is about to announce European VARs to do the same. Jeff Solash, Delphi licensing executive, says the goal is to spread its horizontal modelling and digital process design (MM and DPD) – which can significantly reduce product and process design costs and increase productivity through design for manufacture. “Delphi has 41 centres globally so this has been very key for us,” explains Solash. “PLM all sounds very nice, but what’s its substance? We needed a way to make CAD models and process designs usable – and to eliminate non value-adding processes.” He cites the example of changes made every day on a product from numerous potential sources that require synchronisation across all users. And with nested feature trees that’s “an impossible situation, a nightmare.” Conventionally there are similar issues with process sheets attempting to follow model improvements. “Even non-complex products can have, say, 200 process sheets – and everyone has to re-do them all every time,” he says. “We asked software vendors to help, but they didn’t, so we developed our own software, which is within the bounds of existing software.” Hence the HM enhancement, which runs with existing CAD systems, and caters for change management, also ensuring that data is usable in downstream functions. DPD then starts with horizontal models and creates master process models and their process sheets. When combined, these enable greater concurrency between product and process design, shorter design-to-product cycles, increased productivity and greater innovation. “We’ve proven it with a BoM of 3,000 parts, and we’re wanting to spread this standard methodology to the CAD community to make everyone more efficient,” says Solash. “We definitely want to go world-wide with this. We’re looking for a reasonable number of high quality channel partners… We’re in the early stages in Europe, but we’re close to signing. It will be this year.”