Atlas was a new adopter of Autodesk Inventor for 3D product design. The product design team was very excited about the time-to-market improvements and the ability to create more complex designs. New designs were completed faster and this was putting pressure on the manufacturing team to improve the assembly process to keep up with the more efficient engineering pipeline. Atlas was experiencing difficulty with the outsourced manufacturing vendors. Specifically, the more complex products that Atlas had developed required detailed welding procedures and the welding team was making mistakes daily. This resulted in costly errors and increased time-to-market.
Richard is an industrial engineer at Atlas Material and Testing Solutions and began to seek a solution to this problem. His insight led him to seek product to help eliminate the downstream bottlenecks. Mr. Donato saw the value that engineering had experienced in moving to 3D, and this inspired him to consider ways that they could leverage the investment downstream. Initially, Atlas purchased a single seat of QuadriSpace Pages3D to create instructions for the welders. By leveraging interactive visualization of the products, the outsourced welders were able to dramatically improve efficiency by properly orienting components before welding. The resulting documents are delivered via a shared intranet. Atlas expressed that the primary benefit was communication. The communication using QuadriSpace was quickly implemented on the internal shop floor as well.
Atlas’s success in the manufacturing department quickly led to additional uses of the 3D design information in other departments. “Currently, QuadriSpace documents are used in Manufacturing, Service, and Parts Sales”, commented Richard, “Service engineers say that they are able to look at the model while talking to the customer. It helps.” International sales representatives use QuadriSpace visualization to properly identify spare parts with customers. In the past, Atlas would send out the wrong spare part causing unnecessary downtime for customers.