CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
19 April 2005
Implementation Investments
Ford Service Division Selects Kineo CAM for Automatic Path Planning in Design for Serviceability
Kineo C.A.M. announced that Ford has selected Kineo Path Planner, the automatic path planning solution from Kineo C.A.M. The deployment will start in the Service Engineering Operations at Ford in the UK and Germany as well as at Land Rover and Jaguar.
"Using Kineo, we were quickly able to see where a design proposal prevented component removal in Service. Being able to communicate precise change information to Engineering led directly to a design modification and issue resolution. The ability to accurately assess and resolve Service issues early in the design phase is key to reducing repair costs and increasing Customer Satisfaction.
The speed and accuracy of Kineo has enabled us to move from being a reactive force to a proactive one; a key challenge for any function in today's world of ever shorter development cycle times," says Peter Kinch, C3P Supervisor-Service Engineering Operations, Ford- Europe.
"Kineo Path Planner responds to the demand for a tool complementing existing software solutions using traditional methods in the area of path planning, says Mickael Reux, Business Development Manager, Kineo C.A.M. "Virtually validating the mounting or dismounting of vehicle parts can take several hours of tedious trial and error engineering work with traditional methods; using the powerful automatic approach from Kineo, you can prove within a few minutes that a solution exists or provide valuable information for required design changes. Therefore having a tool that enables to generate, validate and document complex trajectories in an easy and rapid manner has a significant impact on cost and time efficiencies throughout the whole vehicle design cycle. Indeed it permits to multiply the number of studies performed at each stage of the vehicle design in order to reduce the likelihood and frequency of costly changes when detected too late. The automatic and intuitive approach also allows deploying the solution to non-specialized people, thus letting more time to experts to focus on complex cases and to find the most accurate solution".
Kineo Path PlannerT is a software tool specialized in finding and generating collision-free trajectories in a totally automatic way within a highly constrained 3D environment. It perfectly fits into the CAD/PDM methodology and environment due to direct data exchange capabilities and therefore ideally complements the existing tools for diverse assembly/disassembly studies throughout the whole vehicle design cycle.
Kineo C.A.M., based in Toulouse, France, is a spin-off company from the LAAS/CNRS (French National Center of Scientific Research). Active worldwide in the automotive and aerospace industries, Kineo C.A.M. develops, markets and supports best-in-class path planning solutions that rely on 15 years research and improve the computation of automated collision free path finding for digital mock-ups.
For more information, visit http://www.kineocam.com .
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