CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
12 February 2013
Implementation Investments
PTC Creo Brings Super Sentai Series’ Power Rangers to Life for Bandai
PTC announced today that Bandai Co., Ltd, a leading Japanese toy manufacturer, has adopted PTC Creo® design software for its product design solution. PTC Creo will be used to develop Bandai products, including Bandai's signature Super Sentai brand. The Super Sentai characters have been translated to the internationally well known “Power Rangers” brand, which is broadcast in more than 60 countries worldwide.
The Bandai Boys’ Toy group standardized on PTC’s Pro/ENGINEER® design software for product design in 2006. Bandai also implemented Pro/ENGINEER for mold design, enabling the product design and mold design teams to exchange data directly and accelerate their processes. In 2011, Bandai’s Boys’ Toy group deployed PTC Creo to take advantage of PTC Creo’s direct modeling capabilities in a traditional parametric environment, free-style modeling, and the compatibility between PTC Creo and its legacy CAD tools and imported CAD data. Bandai felt that PTC Creo offered superior capabilities in five areas critical to Bandai’s success: base model design, part modeling, assembly modeling, drafting and specification sheet generation. Bandai also felt that the use of PTC Creo would help improve collaboration with its overseas factories and group companies.
Bandai also recognized that in order to achieve its goals, it needed to increase design agility in its development process. The need for increased design agility in product development is a common challenge facing today’s manufacturers. In a recent study on design agility by PTC, 37.9% of surveyed users said that on a recent project, they experienced dramatic or multiple last-minute changes. Further, Chad Jackson, founding Industry Analyst, Lifecycle Insights, notes, “Engineering and design is all about iteration, exploration and discovery. As product designs progress, more design agility is needed to meet the fast-paced demands of development.” (CAD and the Need for Design Agility, ebook)
PTC Creo provides Bandai with the flexibility to use both direct and parametric modeling approaches for product design. By allowing parametric feature-based models to be changed with direct modeling techniques and enabling the changes to be recorded in the parametric model, PTC Creo helps reduce the impact of late stage design changes and helps increase design agility.
“The Boys’ Toy group has never been afraid of change and aggressively pursued 3D CAD systems initiatives.” said Takahiro Mizuno, General Manager, Boys’ Toy Department, Bandai. “PTC Creo has enabled us to make last-minute changes quickly through the integration of parametric and direct modeling approaches, leading to reduced time to production and improved efficiency. As a result, we are now able to spend more time on engineering and improve the quality of our products.”
“We are honored that Bandai has adopted PTC Creo as its enterprise design software solution,” said Hiroaki Kuwahara, President, PTC Japan. “PTC is dedicated to helping its customers achieve product and service advantage by providing best-in-class technology solutions like PTC Creo. We look forward to helping the Bandai team achieve success with its 3D CAD initiatives and continue to deliver great products.”
The PTC Creo implementation and technical support for Bandai are provided by Hitachi Solutions, a PTC Channel partner.
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