25% time savings at Lotus

“Before we had I/Check, only 10% of CAD models [Catia] submitted for checking were accepted first time. Now it’s up to 60% and rising,” says Simon Ward, applications engineer for Norfolk-based automotive engineering contractor, Lotus Engineering. “We’ve achieved a 25% reduction in model-checking time … We’ve seen a 5% time reduction for each model generated by our design engineers … These are major achievements by any standard,” he adds. “Because we’re now producing CAD data to consistently high degrees of accuracy, conforming to common standards, we’ve seen a significant drop-off in the number of queries received from downstream operations in production and manufacturing … We originally predicted ROI at six months, but the project’s paid for itself in just three,” says Ward. As well as designing its own vehicles, Lotus acts as an outsourced design function for major automotive OEMs such as GM and Volvo. But with these projects comes differing customer-imposed design quality standards, and this is where IT consultant, Incat’s technology has proved to be a huge hit. An I/Check pilot was successfully completed in 2000, and the company intends to integrate the software across all its global sites in the near future.