Car seat maker shaves 50% off development time

German car child seat manufacturer Concord Kinderautositze reckons its halved product development times since adopting 3D CAD. Its impressive results stem from improved accuracy in representing increasingly complex shapes, better collaboration with partners and suppliers by circulating digital models independent of remote CAD applications, and much faster direct-driven model building. Concord managing director Georg Kunz says: “The big advantage is clearly the data exchange via IGES or VDA-FS. This allows us to provide our consulting engineers with the data directly, in most cases avoiding errors. We also get our prototypes faster, which saves enormous amounts of time in our work processes.” Like others in this sector, Concord is heavily involved in R&D to drive safety standards, and that has a knock on effect on both design sophistication and demands on rapid prototyping. “Because we often exchange CAD data with other companies, we need good interfaces. That was one of the reasons why we introduced new software in the design department,” says Walter König, head of science. “We also wanted to make our design processes more efficient,” he adds. “The increasingly complex parts could no longer be adequately represented in the 2D CAD system. We needed new software we could use on PCs and which wouldn’t exceed our budget.” The firm went for VX – partly for its functionality, performance and price; partly for its data exchange through VDA-FS and IGES files; and partly for its STL interface for rapid prototyping. Designers now do all component and product design and modelling in VX, before forwarding data to tool and mold makers for CAM. Designer Uwe Schobert says: “The great advantage is that the software is a hybrid surface and solid modeller, which means that solids can be generated from individual surfaces. “All processing commands can be traced. With the history, there’s no problem going back one or more steps in the design of a component. The required depth can be defined in the system by the individual users,” he says. Every change is saved in VX or in Windows Explorer as an individual file for retrieval. “It makes the design work much easier and clearer.” Kunz says that when it comes to prototypes, tools, molds and plastic parts, they’re made by local and global suppliers: “This is no longer a problem… We send files via ISDN or in e-mails. We send the complete files in VDA-FS or IGES format with all the component data to our suppliers, who can open and process them even if they use other CAD systems.” It’s an iterative process, with typically three modification phases between the pilot run for a child seat and the start of production, but Concord’s experience is that the systems work, and work well. Says Kunz: “The VX system is very precise and works perfectly in our firm.”