Monday September 30, 2019 at 10:38am
They focus on
improving productivity continuously, driving developments in sales by using
methods within the business that help their people do more with less effort. When
Dolphin decided to automate their design process, they looked around for
different options on the market but being SOLIDWORKS users already, in
partnership with us, they discovered DriveWorks. Product Design Engineer, Robert Kenny-Allen, commented: “We had someone come in from Solid Solutions for a DriveWorks
demonstration and we decided from there that it was the right tool for us to
better automate our products.
We really
believe that it has made it very easy to specify a system, so our biggest
benefit from implementing design automation into our company is the user experience, giving the customer
the ability to configure our product and be able to see all the different
configurations available from that product in real-time.
All those
production files are created without any need for the design team to even see
the job, which has made a huge difference on results and design. Every single
job now can just flow straight through operations and we can spend a lot more
time on new products and new innovations.”
However, it
is important to know design automation is a process that evolves over time. Our
Product Manager at Solid Solutions, Paul Churm, points out: “Some people ask me
‘When will I start seeing the results of my investment in design automation?’ I
say it depends on the type of automation they are trying to achieve. You can
take small sub-assemblies and get them quickly automated to save time, which
means there’s more time available to dedicate to the rest of your design
automation process. If the customer wants to incorporate the tools onto their
website and offer a portal where their clients can customise and pick and
choose their products, that takes a bit more time. We have had cases of
customers going from scratch to live on the web within 18 months. It all
depends on the product, the amount of product and variance and, of course, the
time the company dedicates to installing the new system.”
Robert
continues, “It needs your undivided attention and time input to get it working.
Our experience with Solid Solutions has been a very positive one throughout the
whole journey of installing DriveWorks, right from getting a demonstration on-site
to helping us install the right software, to then supporting us as we worked on
our user forms and all of our models in DriveWorks.”
Another
important aspect of automating designs is that it retains knowledge within the
business. As Paul mentions in this video, “There is a lot of information stored within the four walls
of any business.
That could be in the form of spreadsheets, files scattered on servers or the usual person who has been in the company for many years and is the go-to guy when it comes to finding product information. What we do is take
all that information and centralise it into the back-end of our system. This
way the knowledge is stored within the four walls of the business, what we
refer to as KBE (Knowledge Base Engineering), which helps any business moving
forward and not having to worry about information leaving the company when an
employee retires or moves on in their career path.”
For more
information about Dolphin Solutions, visit: https://www.dolphinsolutions.co.uk/en/
Get in touch with Paul if you would like to learn
more about design automation.