Packaging machinery manufacturer chooses Solid Edge to improve design productivity

GEI Autowrappers, the Norwich-based packaging machine manufacturer, has signed contracts with UGS worth £50,000 to move from its existing 2D drafting system to UGS’ Solid Edge 3D mechanical CAD software. The deal, which was secured by Solid Edge’s Oxfordshire-based reseller, Cutting Edge Solutions, includes 12 seats of software running on a network of Pentium PCs on Windows NT. Michael Moore, drawing office services engineer at GEI comments: “We already had a pretty good idea of the potential benefits of 3D solid modelling. We selected Solid Edge because of its ease-of-use, its sheet metal design facilities and because of the comfort factor that came with having a name like UGS behind it.” The company has already experienced benefits since moving to 3D. Detailed drawings, sections and assembly drawings required for manufacturing purposes can now be generated as and when needed - typically within 15 minutes – directly from the 3D solid model. And GEI has successfully completed its first project using SolidEdge. A new high-speed bottle inspection machine, which is made up of more than 1,000 individual components, was designed from scratch in six months by three designers. Moore explains: “This project proves the real value of a 3D design environment. Not only did it enable us to carry out much of the design work in the context of an assembly and thereby avoid interference between different components, the in-built visualisation facilities in Solid Edge enabled us to produce photo-realistic images of the machine for customer presentation purposes ... Customers can understand the design more easily.”