Opening Manufacturing 'Doors' -- Only Online DWM July/August 2006

Only Online -Door and Window Manufacturer July/August 2006

Opening Manufacturing 'Doors'
3D Modeling Software Removes Production-to-Design Barriers
By Jeff Drust

For a company that's been in business nearly sixty years, changing with the times is a matter of course. For KVAL Inc. of Petaluma, Calif., a family-owned company that has designed and manufactured heavy industrial woodworking machinery since 1947, changing software was also a matter of increasing the business' efficiency and improving its service.

To quickly and accurately provide custom machinery designs, KVAL had used a 3D modeling solution from SolidWorks Corp.

"KVAL tried to use SolidWorks eDrawings capability to share 2D and 3D designs downstream of engineering," said Sebastien Jame, engineering services director at KVAL. "We still use eDrawings for 2D, but the size of the 3D files for KVAL machines and the consequent time to load, view (zoom/pan) and manipulate the models was too slow for 3D model sharing and publishing."

Then the company discovered Lattice3D, from San Francisco-based Lattice Technology Inc., and its XVL compression technology.

"We did an evaluation, easily created our 3D files at a fraction of the size of the eDrawings and tested high performance viewing even on low-price PC," said Jame. "The combination of SolidWorks to create 3D models and XVL to share them has decreased assembly and reworking time by as much as 20 percent, reduced new technician learning curves to minutes instead of days and reduced spare part service calls often by 15 to 20 minutes."
This new 3D communication has opened new doors for KVAL.

Connecting Design and Production
To meet a specific customer's requirements, KVAL's engineering department would design a variant automatic door milling machine and send it "over the wall" to the production floor, and then not hear anything back for a while. Personnel would often find difficulties in the design's manufacturability and send a set of marked-up paper drawings back over the wall to engineering. The two departments communicated in this manner because the wall consisted mainly of a technological barrier.

Now the process of design and manufacturing has become a team effort between the two groups. The design-to-manufacturing workflow has been reduced because there are not as many CAD changes. Advice from the production floor on the easiest way to build an assembly is now immediately accessible by the designers. Manufacturers with no CAD expertise can use the simple XVL animation tools and free viewers. The result is increased productivity and reduced rework.

In just a few months, the compression innovation similarly affected KVAL technical support and service, which handles support calls. Often the customer is looking at the installed KVAL machine while calling from a cell phone and trying to order a spare part. The KVAL technical support and service staff used to have to locate the right paper drawing, including the variants for that customer's particular machine. Now support staff simply views automatic HTML pages showing the model, assembly structure and animated configuration on their desktop PCs via a web browser. As the customer describes the problem, the technicians zoom and pan to 'virtually' see what the customer sees.

According to Jame, "What often used to take us 15 to 20 minutes is done in seconds, and with no mistakes shipping the wrong part."

Reaching Customers in the Field
The company hopes to use 100 percent 3D technology in the future.

"We want to give our customers, via the KVAL website or an online webex session, the ability to directly view and access a 3D model of their unique machine in order to identify problems and directly ordering spare parts. The customers we've already shown this to are very excited about it," Jame says. "We plan to deliver KVAL machines, not with a paper user manual, but with a portable computer loaded with the Lattice3D viewer, the 3D XVL files (including disassembly and assembly animations) of the customer's machine and webex so that customers and KVAL field service staff can readily understand and work on problems together."

With Lattice3D applications, a series of components can be shown being put together or taken apart in the correct order of assembly. Just as Lattice3D's technology is revolutionizing catalog publication by using illustrations directly from engineering CAD parts, XVL animations provide a useful tool for technical and maintenance training manuals. What's more, unlike movie or AVI animations, XVL animations can be viewed not just from the original camera position but from anywhere in virtual 3D space. If one wants to see how it come apart from underneath, one can move the mouse to rotate the model around while the animation is playing.

The company plans to link the lightweight XVL models of KVAL machines to other information in the ERP system such as price information and animated assembly models. This simple HTML programming will incorporate the tribal knowledge of KVAL assembly specialists so that it can be equally useful for field repairs.

"We have really only just started with what Lattice3D's applications and XVL format can do for KVAL," said Jame. "Yet what it has already done for us in just five months has really exceeded my expectations. XVL has been extremely helpful throughout our entire operation."

Jeff Drust handles marketing for Lattice Technology Inc.