Innovation is the key to saving money and making a company profitable. Has there ever been a better time to take advantage of tools at our disposal to save some money here and there? Let's take a look at a sample situation.
The Acme Molding Company has received a project to mold 50,000 of these parts a month for the next three years:
It is going to be molded out of blue abs and weighs in at just about 147 grams of weight. Using a current average price of ABS resin of $1.43/pound, Acme will need to purchase 194,447 pounds of ABS at a cost of $278,059.21
After Acme takes the job, their customer comes back to them saying they need to shave some costs off the project without compromising the design. They think a part redesign may be in order. They figure they need to shave off as much as 50 grams to cut their plastic resin cost.
So the designer opens up the part model is SolidWorks and adds a Sensor feature to the part:
This tells SolidWorks to monitor the mass of the part and to alert the user when the mass has dropped below the 98 grams threshold. So the first step is to put the part on a diet, and shell out some of the handle:
To maintain the strength of the knob, he also adds some ribs for rigidity. As he finishes off his changes he notices an alert in his feature tree:
The mass has dropped below 98 grams, and SolidWorks is alerting him to that. After running a simple analysis and determining the part is rigid enough, they sign off on the new design, and off it goes for production.
By reducing the weight of the part, Acme was able to save nearly 65,000 pounds of resin a year with a savings of almost $93,000 per year to their customer.
This is a very simple example, but using the tools available to engineers is what will help companies pull out of the tough times, and help turn things around for everyone. Just think of the tools available to you, and think about how you can use them to save your company some money, every gram helps!
Nice job Mike, thanks for sharing.
Devon
Posted by: Devon T. Sowell | February 28, 2009 at 11:05 AM
Ok, I will ask since I do not know. Are Sensors in SW 2009? Since we have not been upgraded at work yet, I have missed a lot of the new stuff.
I do like how this tool works, it would allow me to work towards a goal without being restrained on the shape of the part. Thank you for the post Mike!
Posted by: Rod Uding | February 28, 2009 at 09:42 AM