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Head Office: MAPOld Market Place Tel: (0121) 544 1400 Northern Office: MAP
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Case StudiesHerga Electric finds solid reasons for making the switch from 2D to 3D.
If you’ve ever enjoyed the pleasures of a Jacuzzi spa bath, or the probably not quite so relaxing use of a kitchen waste disposal unit, then you have probably also used one of Herga Electric’s products. Not that you are likely to have realised that at the time. Like many companies, the products which Herga Electric designs and manufactures often go largely unnoticed, incorporated as they are into the finished product that you buy. Herga Electric, which employs around 140 people at its
headquarters in Bury St. Edmunds and has annual revenues of some £4 million, is a leader in
the field of switching and sensing systems. Its products are used to turn electrical
equipment on and off - either automatically, manually or remotely - and can be found in a
wide variety of domestic, medical and industrial products. First steps into CAD.About eight years ago, Herga decided that it needed to ‘get into CAD’. Like many other similar sized companies who design and manufacture mechanical and electro-mechanical products, it bought a 2D drafting system. Now the company is phasing that 2D system out in favour of one of today’s Windows-native 3D solid modelling systems. Why? As Ian Thomas, Herga’s project and engineering co-ordinator says, "Up until the time we bought the 2D system, all design and drafting work was done manually at the drawing board. The 2D system was a start but was really no more than an electronic drawing board". Furthermore, it was DOS-based and each seat was standalone. As DOS gave way to 32-bit Windows in Herga’s administration and office automation systems, as it has done throughout much of industry, the 2D CAD system’s limitations began to show. Technology had moved on since Herga first adopted CAD. Worse, support - or rather, the lack of it - from the original vendor and then their successor was beginning to prove a real problem. The decision was therefore made to evaluate today’s true Windows-based CAD systems. That was last year. And while 2D was still viewed at that time by many in the company as their real need, there was also a growing awareness among others of the possibilities offered by 3D solid modelling. "We had ended up with a bit of a mish-mash of a system, which wasn’t being supported and had been overtaken by other, more capable systems," explains Thomas. "We therefore decided to bite the bullet and conduct a thorough evaluation of all the Windows-based 3D CAD systems on the market, with a view to satisfying both our immediate and our future needs," They narrowed the choice down to two - SolidWorks and Solid Edge. From their evaluations Herga had concluded that these two products offered very similar capabilities, at very similar prices - but with one important difference from their point of view. Solid Edge offers an extremely capable 2D drafting module - Solid Edge/Draft - which is available separately from the full 3D solid modelling product. 2D now - 3D later.This meant they could acquire a modern 2D drafting
system to satisfy their immediate needs but which also gave them a very clear upgrade path
to 3D solid modelling in the future. This fitted Herga’s vision at the time, of using
3D for design but retaining 2D-only seats for detail drafting. It also satisfied their
cost considerations and meant that they could break down the introduction of the new
system into easily manageable pieces. So in February this year, Herga Electric asked Unigraphics Solutions VAR, SOLID Applications Ltd. to supply it with four seats of Solid Edge/Draft. The benefits were immediately apparent. The software was stable and didn’t lock up like the old system did. Being networked, files could be moved around easily and work could be shared out. And they could import files from their old system, from customers via e-mail using DXF and could send files to their suppliers. The world was already opening up. But it soon became apparent that 3D solid modelling had even more to offer. During the evaluation and later during system implementation, SOLID Applications had shown Herga’s management just what solid modelling can provide in terms of design flexibility and productivity. In July this year, Herga therefore upgraded two of their Solid Edge/Draft seats to the full Solid Edge 3D solid modelling product. This coincided with Herga’s introduction of a design approach which, in addition to function, considered form more than had previously been the case. This meant that products had begun to include complex curves, which are difficult to describe accurately in a 2D drawing. Solid benefits.Again, the benefits to be had from 3D solid modelling were recognised almost immediately. As Thomas explains, "Within a month of Solid Edge being installed we were modelling parts in 3D and creating assemblies. There had been some reticence among people to accept that 3D solids had advantages over 2D but once they saw it in action they quickly realised what they had been missing." For example, the hours of discussion which used to go on between the designer and the drawing office over what something was supposed to look like ended immediately. Both could use the 3D model to quickly agree on a common vision. This alone had a major benefit on design productivity. In addition, because a lot of Herga’s work involves customising existing products for a specific application, they could now develop just one solid model of a product and from that model, automatically produce the drawings for a specific version just by editing the dimensions. The in-built visualisation facilities and the ability to create cut-away and exploded views at the touch of a button has also brought major benefits for the sales staff during discussions with customers and in the production of user documentation. Furthermore, although it’s still early days, Herga’s first attempts at assembly modelling with Solid Edge have caused great excitement in the office as it has became clear how the ability to check the fit of components will benefit the overall product development process. But perhaps the most surprising benefit so far is that, although they can readily import their legacy 2D drawings into Solid Edge, more often than not it is proving quicker to model a part from scratch in Solid Edge and to then produce the required 2D drawings automatically from the 3D model. With this experience, Herga Electric has revised its original vision. It now sees 3D solid modelling as the way forward for all its design and drafting work in future in order to keep it a world leader.
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