Manufacturing

Case Study:

Production progress at A-dec

18 October 2007

To handle increased orders, dental equipment manufacturer A-dec implemented a more sophisticated and efficient production system from Dassault Systèmes to keep up with demand.

A privately held company founded more than 40 years ago near Portland, Oregon, USA, A-dec has developed into one of the world’s largest producers of dental equipment, with annual sales of more than US$250 million.

When the company introduced a greatly expanded catalogue of standard-order cabinetry in 2000, orders skyrocketed. Unfortunately, the additional volume was beyond the limits of the company’s production system, and orders quickly outstripped capacity.

A-dec needed a new system that could automate growing volumes of routine orders from design to production, giving designers more time to spend on custom orders and new product development.

A-dec eventually selected V5 PLM from Dassault Systèmes, including Catia V5 for 3D modelling and Enovia SmarTeam for data management.

Catia V5’s ability to integrate the design and manufacturing environment within a single platform was a key differentiator. “If the other systems offered parametric rules they were part of a different system, but they were built into Catia,” says Wes Snyder, engineering manager for A-dec’s furniture group. “Catia V5 features parametric design capabilities driven by Knowledgeware, which allows A-dec to store its standard assemblies as design templates. When a customer’s order is processed, Catia V5 and an in-house control application automatically configure the templates to the right size, shape and colour.”

Catia V5 generates the numerical control (NC) instructions to manufacture the components, outputting them to A-dec’s milling and routing machinery directly from the 3D model. This eliminates data re-keying and its inherent potential for error.

Enovia SmarTeam, based on the Microsoft SQL Server database, serves as the data engine. It manages the intelligence behind the parametric modelling capabilities as well as the history of Catia V5 designs.

3D XML allows manufacturing engineers and assembly workers to resolve questions by viewing Catia designs in 3D on the shopfloor. As an intuitive viewing tool similar to an Internet browser, 3D XML requires little training.

The solution has resulted in the practical elimination of production capacity limits. Catia V5 has significantly reduced the need for physical prototypes for design ‘checking’. Since data is never translated or re-entered, the errors that once made multiple physical prototypes necessary have been dramatically reduced. Building the NC output into the models parametrically ensured fully automated manufacturing code generation.

A-dec’s previous system obliged employees to remember which products required exceptions to standard practice. By using Knowledgeware to build ‘tribal knowledge’ into Catia V5, the system automatically propagates changes to all affected parts, ensuring higher quality control.

This article first appeared in the Autumn 2007 issue of Prime magazine.