Swindon Pressings Drive To V5 With Desktop Engineering

Swindon Pressings Ltd. (SPL) provides pressings and full systems engineering. As a world class 1st tier supplier to the automotive industry, SPL's customers include BMW Group, Land Rover, MG Rover, Honda and Nissan. It provides a complete on-site project management service, from feasibility testing and prototype development to tool procurement and high volume panel production. 19 press lines and sub assembly facilities covering 38,000m² support this service.

"Desktop Engineering have proved to be an excellent and reliable resource."
Peter Tyrrell, IT Systems Project Manager, Swindon

V5 migration

SPL was aware of the CATIA Version 5 pilot trials taking place at its customers’ sites, and wanted to ensure that it was able to effectively deal with their data. BMW was also piloting the software, and had declared its intention to migrate in line with the development of one of its future models. Because of the development cycle for tooling, SPL anticipated that it would soon be receiving new designs in V5. It appreciated that there were considerable interface and functionality differences between V4 and V5 together with a new hardware platform. The requirement to avoid any delays and difficulties in interpreting customers’ data led SPL to instigate its own V5 pilot project. Currently SPL have 25 floating licences of CATIA V4 available across 40 workstations. The ultimate aim is to migrate these all to V5 on a PC platform.

Ideal partner

Desktop Engineering, an IBM Business Partner, already had a strong working relationship with SPL, working with it on day-to-day CATIA support and the installation and maintenance of IBM’s Tivoli network management software. It was originally chosen for its specialist skills, which mapped directly to the requirements of SPL. Additionally, Desktop Engineering has extensive skill sets in CAM and manufacturing, making it the natural choice for SPL to guide it through its V5 pilot project.  

Helpful and knowledgeable

The on site training provided by Desktop Engineering covered basic and advanced techniques, interspersed with self study elements. Following the initial training, weekly individual training sessions helped the SPL engineers to work with real jobs and solve practical task related problems. A Project Engineer at SPL commented, “Directly after the course, 95% of my design work was completed in V5. The on-site arrangement was excellent, providing the flexibility to fit in with our work load.” Desktop Engineering provides a resident engineer at Swindon, who offers first line support, and coordinates the response. The Project Engineer continued, “The support desk is helpful and knowledgeable - a two hour turn around is typical.”

Design benefits

SPL found considerable benefits to justify the migration. For design they proved that V5 was faster in every respect, especially in design modification where eight fold speed improvements were recorded. Their engineers also found it was easier to use, had the benefits of a Windows interface, and enabled easier sharing of data with other software packages including Microsoft Excel and Word. Impressive as these improvements were, even greater benefits were achieved at SPL’s Prototype Area.

30-hour savings

A number of pilot trials were carried out to compare results achieved with V5 with what had been achieved with V4. Tooling being machined on SPL’s Prototype Area’s 5-axis Mecof machine can be over 3m long, so calculation times for the software were an important factor. Here, V5 gave savings of up to 32 hours, enabling work to reach the shop floor far quicker than was previously possible. In addition, the NC Verify software for toolpath checking offered tools to eliminate collisions, which could have resulted in costly damage to the machine tool. The new machining strategies in V5 were also appreciated by the Prototype Area’s engineers, by helping to reduce the number of head turns on the Mecof, and also reducing head and tool wear.