Affordable factory simulation system speeds sales

Citation

(2008), "Affordable factory simulation system speeds sales", Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, Vol. 80 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/aeat.2008.12780eaf.003

Affordable factory simulation system speeds sales

Article Type: Features From: Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology: An International Journal, Volume 80, Issue 5

The marketing, sales, engineering and manufacturing resources of the ASYS group of companies, plus its external business partners, are gaining major financial savings and competitive advantages by using cost-effective digital factory 3D simulation software from Visual Components.

The international ASYS group of companies is a rapidly expanding manufacturer of production machinery for the worldwide electronics and solar energy industries. More than an 80 per cent improvement in sales response time and other competitive benefits have been gained by installing three-dimensional (3D) factory simulation software from Visual Components. The software is now used throughout the German company’s global marketing and sales network, including its business partnerships.

One of the most important benefits to date has been experienced in the marketing department, using the software as a means to quickly create all kinds of material for the company, such as graphic displays and literature for trade shows, advertisements for magazines, or marketing information such as data sheets and brochures.

ASYS invested in factory simulation software because the company wanted a faster and less costly way to show customers, early in the sales cycle, a realistic 3D digital representation of a proposed production line and its components. Visualisation is key because the products are complicated and customers want to “walk around the line” and see how the various machines fit together. They want to be sure a configuration is fully optimised. They want to check the functionality of the system and ask “what if” questions including spatial factors such as the line layout “footprint”, or the handling of raw material and finished goods for lean manufacturing purposes.

The electronics industry in particular is a tough, fast moving industrial sector. Manufacturers of capital and consumer goods are under constant pressure to introduce new, or improve, existing products. Production lines and workcells are always changing. To meet this demand ASYS has developed “plug-in” modules that may be quickly installed, or re-configured to meet new production requirements.

Before, to produce a high-quality 3D illustration for marketing or sales presentations was costly and time-consuming. It meant commissioning an external industrial design studio to produce the artwork. The industrial designers manually developed an illustration for an existing machine or system from a 2D CAD layout and other images supplied by ASYS. An illustration for a new machine relied on a CAD drawing and close dialogue with the company’s engineers. If a variant, option or radical change was requested a totally new illustration had to be produced. Not being linked to a CAD database, the existing illustration could not be re-used.

On the CAD side, with the level of detail required to represent individual machines, the system would become bogged down with huge data overload if used to design assembly lines and factories in 3D. Adding to the challenge was the modular nature of ASYS products and that non-standard variants were often required.

An alternative was the vastly more expensive simulation software that is typically used in the automotive market, but this was well outside the company’s budget and would require a massive server to support data management. To enable ASYS sales personnel to show customers 3D simulations in the field, the appropriate software had to work on laptop computers.

Finding the right solution

OEM business manager Klaus Bronner, based at ASYS group’s Dornstadt headquarters near Ulm in Germany, was made responsible for introducing an affordable and effective solution. He drew up a rigorous and systematic approach to finding, selecting and implementing the right system.

“We wanted a highly realistic portrayal of our products with animated, configurable functions. We needed fast and configurable production line planning, using ‘lightweight’ 3D models for e-mailing internally and to customers. We wanted simple planning of variants and editable parameters, and the option to create realistic simulations of complex production processes. We also wanted to brand the system, to impress our name on new customers,” he said.

Other requirements included a good graphical interface, as users would range from marketing and sales, to engineering and production departments. Bronner also anticipated customers being able to view and manipulate proposals, so ease of use was doubly crucial. The preferred supplier would have to offer global maintenance support, and a multilingual system for use in all countries served by the company.

Visual Components, a well-established Finnish developer of low-cost but advanced digital factory simulation software, met all the functional and budgetary requirements. It helped that a business partner, Dualis GmbH IT Solution, was in the region to provide any technical and sales support needed.

In 2004, ASYS purchased all three packages within the supplier’s software suite: 3D Create, a developer’s toolkit enabling a library of “intelligent” product models to be built in 3D and animated; 3D Realize, a configurator to arrange and snap together the 3D models; and 3D Video, a free viewer enabling the manufacturer’s customers to see and manipulate the whole model in 3D without owning the core software.

Existing data are transferred from the SolidEdge 3D CAD system into the first software package, 3D Create, to construct a 3D product model. The software is based on component technology, so “intelligence” can be built into each model of equipment. This means a model will automatically “know” if it can connect to another. Using models in the library and a simple “drag and drop” process, an entire production line may be rapidly built up by the user, based on inherent rules in the system, set by the company. For the salesforce, this is an important feature - in minutes a line may be constructed or changed in front of the customer.

ASYS set up four pilot projects to test the value of potential further investment. 3D models of part of the currently available product range were produced. Overall, the positive results gained led to the start of a worldwide rollout in February 2005.

Dramatic benefits

After using Visual Components to build a full library of standard models, ASYS slashed a dramatic eighty per cent off the time it used to take to respond to new customer enquiries and create animated, 3D proposals.

Klaus Bronner explained: “Once we have presented a 3D proposal, if a customer wants to see additional layouts, we can adjust the existing configuration within minutes and e-mail back a PDF graphics file of the modified production line configuration. This process can take, depending on customer wishes, less than ten minutes. In this case we can save even more time, up to ninety per cent, compared to what we did before.”

In addition, thanks to Visual Components’ lightweight data structure for modelling, a video showing the proposal in full 3D simulation, animated if required, can be e-mailed to the customer and viewed on the suite’s free-to-use simulation package.

“This is why it is so powerful,” he said. “Now we have a tool where we can very efficiently configure a single machine or a complete production line, animated as well to show workflows and automated processes. We also use the system for new product development and manufacturing. In addition, Visual Components has open interfaces to work with other software and we take advantage of this by reusing the 3D models with Cinema4D, a photo-realistic rendering package.”

Recently, the complete range of standard products is available as 3D models to all ASYS sales departments and its business partners around the world, centralised in the Visual Components library. Use has been extended into the marketing department. Applications include customer inquiries, creation of animated 3D production line proposal plans, new production line concepts, illustrations for marketing purposes, trade fair presentations, and benchmarking of various production line concepts.

“Now we have this cost-effective, flexible and portable tool to show prospective customers the latest ASYS product portfolio in 3D, with the additional feature of highly realistic and dynamic animation”, said Klaus Bronner. “It is both a powerful marketing and sales tool, but also greatly helps our engineering and manufacturing departments as well.”

Details available from: Visual Components, Tel: +358 9 323 2250, e-mail: craig.lybeck@visualcomponents.com, web site: www.visualcomponents.com