CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
15 April 2013
Implementation Investments
Herrenknecht Uses ESI’s Collaborative Virtual Reality Solution IC.IDO to Make Engineering Decisions
ESI Group launches a cooperation with Herrenknecht AG. Herrenknecht is adopting ESI’s IC.IDO Virtual Reality solution as a basis for collaborative decision-making. The main objective of Herrenknecht is to enable the many stakeholders in a development project to visualize their product from the earliest stages of its development, life-size and in real-time, so that machine designs can be validated faster.
By adopting IC.IDO, Herrenknecht joins leading-edge manufacturers from the automotive, aeronautic and other industry sectors. John Deere, Jaguar Land Rover, BMW, Ford, Boeing, Jungheinrich, Rheinmetall, Optima Packaging and Trumpf are among the companies who now see a striking advantage in implementing Virtual Reality to spur innovation.
“Leveraging ESI’s leading Virtual Reality technology significantly helps us optimize our development processes. IC.IDO enables us to modify processes and developments collaboratively with our customers, with the common objective to improve on performance, enhance quality and decrease development time,” says Gebhard Lehmann, Vice-Chairman of the Board of Management, of Herrenknecht AG.
Herrenknecht uses Virtual Reality to perform ergonomics studies and complete security assessments, visibility and reachability studies, real-time simulations of wires and hoses, and assembly/disassembly analyses.
Using IC.IDO's ergonomic and intuitive software environment, sales, marketing and technical staff from Herrenknecht can share models with their clients’ decision makers and influencers – communicating naturally with executives, engineers and operators; assuring a common understanding of current and future products and avoiding the misunderstandings and misinterpretations often encountered when relying on drawings and scale models. Thanks to IC.IDO, the distributed players in a project are able to use a shared 3D model as a platform for real-time reviews, enabling constant communication and faster iterations from the earliest stages in the product development process.
Massive amounts of 3D data from different sources (including Herrenknecht, their clients and subcontractors) can be loaded rapidly into one environment, facilitating regular updates and assuring that teams are always current with the latest design progressions. By making the right decisions at the right time, Herrenknecht reduces lead times and product development costs.
Further encouraging the adoption of Virtual Reality, Herrenknecht should benefit from the existence of a readily available pool of young experts from the neighboring Offenburg College, where a similar IC.IDO Virtual Reality set-up has been installed. Local engineering students are indeed taught to master Virtual Reality technology with the objective that they can contribute to its adoption in diverse applications in the future.
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