FMB Oxford
Scientific instrumentation manufacturer, FMB Oxford Ltd, has been able to cut the cost of developing new component parts by 5%; they are using a 3D search solution to successfully find previous part designs so they can be reused by their CAD/CAM designers
The Customer:
FMB Oxford Ltd Manufacture and supply instrumentation to the scientific community. They specialise in supplying bespoke products to the Global synchrotron industry – an industry dedicated to the manufacture of synchrotron machines. Synchrotrons are invaluable for scientific, cutting edge research. Using a combination of magnetic and electric field technology, a synchrotron is capable of ‘seeing’ radio waves, microwaves, infrared light, ultraviolet light, x-rays and gamma rays, as well as molecules and atoms which are not visible through a microscope.
The Challenges:
In common with a lot of manufacturing organisations, FMB spent a lot of time designing new component parts. With bespoke parts, this is often unavoidable, but with many specific-build parts, only a proportion of the components are unique; they will also include several, more common ‘off-the-shelf’ parts, which are already in existence. FMB has an extensive components part library of CAD /CAM designs going back over a period of 16 years. Over this time, systems have been upgraded and key personnel with the knowledge-base have moved on, which often made it difficult to find part designs – but the information is still there.
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and CAD systems, which facilitate the design, management, storage and processing of product data, provide only basic search and retrieval tools for locating parts/files. Users often don’t know the part reference or simply can’t find what they are looking for using keyword and metadata search because the information is just ‘too buried in the system’. It therefore became easier and quicker for an engineer to design again from scratch, rather than waste time looking for an existing part/design.
The knock-on effect of ‘reinventing the wheel’ is that costs escalate unnecessarily. FMB have invested a lot of time and money in product designs, so it seemed logical to rationalise their parts library and maximise the re-use of existing designs to help keep costs under control – but they needed to make it easier and quicker for engineers to find them.
The Solution:
FMB decided to implement ShapeSpace Enterprise 3D shape search technology to help them find existing part designs. All users need to know is either; the basic shape of the part they are looking for, the part size or the text attribute, and ShapeSpace will instantly find any similar parts, regardless of the size of the CAD model database it is searching.
ShapeSpace is integrated with FMB’s incumbent business systems. It replaces the limited search functionality of these systems with a simple to use geometric search. Hundreds of search results are presented collectively on-screen in a 3D visual format for easy identification and comparison.
ShapeSpace can find part design information stored anywhere on the network, regardless of whether the name or part number is known, as well as locating information which has not been correctly classified.
ShapeSpace technology puts all 3D CAD models in a centralised ‘box’ and then indexes files on both geometrical shape (also extracting a 3D thumbnail of that shape so it can be displayed as a 3D image in search results) and as a text file for text search queries.
As well as being able to identify any part visually, users can refine the query further. Based on interaction with the user, the browser adaptively attempts to further distill any shape similarities.
The Benefits:
ShapeSpace allows any organisation that designs, uses and maintains manufacturing components to ‘wring more’ from their existing investments in product design and lifecycle technology. This ultimately delivers a higher level of customer service and profitability, with the added bonus that you are also operating ‘greener and leaner’.
The software is easy to use and intuitive, so very quickly users are able to browse and search for CAD designs/parts that many thought were long lost. This increases a design engineer’s productivity and reduces costs by avoiding the wasted time and expense involved in redesigning something you already have.
FMB said,
The 3D visualisation provided by the ShapeSpace solution makes it easy to search and browse for geometrically similar parts without opening CAD files, so searches are quick and easy. We found that by searching for and reusing existing components we could reduce the number of parts we designed by around 5% – providing a significant saving on the costs of new part introductions. This is a very useful tool which was easily installed and from which we can already see very good business benefits.
More Information
To learn more or to discuss your requirements, please contact us on 0800 988 5593, or email sales@shapespace.com.
