CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
5 January 2010
Implementation Investments
SolidWorks Helps DLP Ltd. Create Barrier-Free Homes For the Disabled
SolidWorks® 3D CAD software and 3DVIA® Composer are helping U.K.-based DLP Ltd. design specialized bathroom fixtures that enable people with disabilities to live independently without making their homes look like hospital rooms.
DLP is one of the U.K.’s largest designers and manufacturers of products for safe bathroom access, such as grab bars, drop down rails, shower and bath seats, and shower screen enclosures. The company puts a high premium on designing durable, attractive, and ergonomically correct products that also comply with European Union regulations. SolidWorks CAD software enables the company’s engineering staff to meet those requirements while turning ideas for modifications and new products into production-release designs.
Accurate manual documentation is especially important to DLP because it emphasizes easy and clear installation instructions. This is an important competitive differentiator. Every DLP product needs installation instructions to be available in English and other international languages. 3DVIA Composer helps DLP create product information up to 80 percent faster than the previous manual system, according to DLP Technical Author Paul Smith.
“3DVIA Composer makes it very easy for us to create technical image views from fully assembled models designed in SolidWorks. We use these views to create the installation instructions for our products,” Smith said. “We can take the assembled drawings from SolidWorks into 3DVIA Composer, and I am able to explode these models and generate section views, focusing on the parts we want to see and hiding the parts we do not need. I can identify each part by labeling or highlighting it and then quickly outputting the views as line drawings. 3DVIA Composer allows us to export high quality technical line drawings for producing detailed installation instructions. By creating these technical views quickly and exporting them in a simple usable format, we have saved most of the time it had taken us to create views manually in SolidWorks.”
To keep up with shifting consumer tastes, DLP engineers must be able to take ideas from sales and marketing and quickly turn them into new or modified products. SolidWorks enables them to do this while avoiding pre-production problems by controlling the individual parts and showing the engineers how parts will fit together in an assembly on screen.
“DLP has to balance aesthetic and utilitarian considerations in a fast-paced environment, with regulatory requirements arching over everything they do,” said Simon Booker, European marketing manager at Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corp. “SolidWorks solutions are designed to provide companies like DLP with the accuracy and agility they need to innovate freely without fear of costly production errors.”
DLP relies on SolidWorks Authorized Reseller Cadtek for ongoing software training, implementation, and support.
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