Thinking About Upgrading To 3-d?

Every day, Ulma Packaging is confronted with the task of designing diverse packaging machinery intended mainly for the food products sector. This is only one facet of the Ulma Group, but it has six different product lines, and the company’s machines consist of multiple parts (between 500 and 600 in one machine, for example). Furthermore, there is a need for highly precise movement, and the machines must meet the exacting hygiene demands of the food products industry.

Before 2001, Ulma Packaging based their design process on a 2-D design solution. The main obstacle of that system was that many phases of design still had to be done manually, which gave rise to frequent errors. In addition to the limitations of 2-D for calculating paths and movements, creating standard parts was a highly manual task, which practically forced the company to design each part from scratch. There were also visualization and dimensioning errors.

The creation of production lists was also problematic because of difficulties communicating with the company’s ERP system (Baan). There were frequent omissions and quantity confusion. When in production, the company experienced interferences, which are difficult to find using 2-D. Corresponding modifications required a redesign, which again posed the possibility of errors.

Ulma Packaging replaced their 2-D program with Solid Edge from Pixel Sistemas, a distributor of Siemens PLM Software. Following a comparison with other 3-D design tool providers, the choice was made in favor of Solid Edge for several reasons. “The three basic points that determined our choice of Solid Edge were its ease of use because it runs under Windows; the ability to customize the tool to our requirements; and the price-performance ratio,” notes Aitor Olalde, technical director of one Ulma product line.

The implementation of Solid Edge occurred in phases. “We first equipped the new products launch team with the new system,” explains Olalde. “This team designs new catalog machines, and their commissioning period was limited to one month. At the same time, we initiated conversion from the legacy system to 3-D and, once this was completed, the product team and then the projects team were equipped. In total, full implementation was finished in eight months.”

Advantages For Designing Machines

In all, Ulma Packaging has three fixed Solid Edge licenses and 60 floating licenses. Floating licenses make it possible to increase the number of users without limiting them to fixed workstations. Solid Edge is used to design the machinery and to create production drawings, lists of assemblies and exploded drawings. The software’s support for product families works well with the modular design of the machines. “The use of families of parts helps us greatly,” says Olalde. “Thanks to this, we are able to link the different modules and, accordingly, we have reduced the time needed for their design and management.”

Olalde finds the exploded drawings module easy to use and says the drafting environment is “very good because it allows you to obtain a part automatically from the assembly you’ve created. It extracts the various views without errors, and it offers the automatic dimensioning function,” he says. Another important feature is Solid Edge’s ability to run simulations and detect interferences, especially with the parts of machines that are in motion, which was impossible with the old system.
The main result of using Solid Edge at Ulma Packaging has been “a revolution,” in the way the company tackles design. “The precision and the ability to automate tasks have allowed planners to confidently delegate to technical drafters,” he explains. “This has translated into a situation in which, now, we can have the planners, who are very powerful professionals, creating while the drafters develop their creations.”

For additional information, click here to visit the Siemens PLM Software website.