25 times faster with smart models
1 min read
Engineering productivity up 25-fold and costs down accordingly, with BoMs (bills of materials) listed accurately and automatically, and engineering drawings created instantly: the judges felt Mech-Tool Engineering's initial achievements were mouth-wateringly good, and hence this commendation.
Mech-Tool is an £8m engineer-to-order company, designing and manufacturing one-offs for the oil and gas, general process and energy sectors - blast walls and, more recently, explosion-proof control rooms and fire-proof noise-control enclosures for industrial pumps, engines and turbines. It's all costly bespoke stuff.
"We decided to look at our front end engineering, which is one of the biggest cost areas for us outside manufacturing," says technical director Ron Davison. "We were all AutoCAD but we needed to make a radical change. So I looked at various 3D systems and found Catia and TransCat PLM." Mech-Tool chose Catia because it wanted to get the advantages of 3D but also produce high quality engineering drawings. Davison also wanted to re-use component designs and automate quotations, material lists and so on - and Catia's knowledge system add-on, with its 'intelligent models', fitted the bill.
TransCat helped Mech-Tool create reusable Knowledgeware templates (part of Dassault's Generative Mechanical Design (GMD) solution in Catia) that captured its processes and standards - giving it the wherewithal to create new designs without starting from scratch. And hence the slashed development times, and the reduced manufacturing costs and commercial risk.
For example, creating BoMs from drawings for its intakes used to consume 30% of Mech-Tool's design hours. Now BoMs are generated instantly and error-free. Additionally, seeing the finished product in 3D helps the metalworkers to interpret their 2D drawings. Martin Harris, Mech-Tool's CAD team lead, says: "In the past we had to go to the factory floor and sort out problems."
And 3D visualisation also helps Mech-Tool's clients: Harris recently showed a client design variations for a 45-ton pump enclosure in real time on Catia. "Because they could see it and watch as we played with various options, the client was able to do things in a more efficient way," explains Davison.
What's his advice? "We thought Catia was something Ford and Boeing use that costs lots of money and was way above what Mech-Tool needed. Now we know better. We no longer look at the cost of the software: we look at the value of the return...
"One day we'll all be using advanced 3D CAD technology. You have to face the challenges, keep it simple, break it down into small, manageable elements - and keep on putting the bricks in that wall."
