Sunrise Medical manufactures medical devices for a worldwide market. Devices are manufactured in-house and the process usually includes the creation of paper packets administered to the shop floor. These packets made it difficult to track revisions or to communicate complex assembly steps. Each time a revision occurred a new packet would be printed and physically delivered to the proper workstation on the shop floor. Sunrise uses SolidWorks to design their products and engineering’s proficiency with the 3D CAD tools has allowed them the new ability to design complex products that offer customers the ability to order devices with custom specifications. Unfortunately, the manufacturing process was not suitable for this level of configurability.
Giaski is an industrial engineer in charge of manufacturing procedures for a custom wheelchair product. She knew that to manufacture the products, a new process would have to be put in place. A local reseller suggested the use of QuadriSpace. Giaski learned the Pages3D product quickly and authored the work instructions. The wheelchair is now assembled using 22 shop floor terminals with QuadriSpace installed. Every installation station has a different work instruction and the stations are configured “on-the-fly” with different QuadriSpace instructions relevant to the customer’s specifications.
“With QuadriSpace, the learning process time is reduced by 30%,” Giaski describes, “and it's faster for us to flex assemblers from one line to another. This saves valuable time working on a chair order.” Giaski continues, “Also, we have to be compliant on our assembly procedures, every revision changes or changes of parts have to be changed on our work instructions and documented. Since we have everything on a server, it's easier for me to upload it without trying to find the books that might be misplaced or have missing pages.”