MECANO engineers specialize in the design, sizing, mechanical testing and management of multidisciplinary and predominantly mechanical projects, such as those undertaken by companies in the aeronautics, space, and embedded systems sectors.
A growing mass of textual information has created challenges of organization, filtering and digestion.
Web meetings, mobile devices, email, instant messaging, twittering, wikis and blogging are making it possible for companies to work around the globe in a virtual 24 hour workday. Along with this trend, there is a growing mass of textual information that becomes difficult to organize, filter and digest.
Even more challenging is the need to communicate complex topics when not in a face-to-face or visual setting, with people that are not always familiar with the concepts that are being explained. Engineers face this problem every day, as they struggle to find easy-to-use technologies to help them communicate clear and near-instantaneous information about their products.
This observation held true at aerospace design and analysis firm MECANO Ingénierie et Développement (MECANO ID). Their engineers specialize in the design, sizing, mechanical testing and management of multidisciplinary and predominantly mechanical projects, such as those undertaken by companies in the aeronautics, space, and embedded systems sectors.
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MECANO ID was looking for a tool that could help them both streamline their development processes—and communicate more effectively with customers like France’s CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) and CNES (Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales). With these types of customers that require information across many departments and disciplines, there are many complex ideas, designs and product layouts that need to be quickly communicated with crystal clear explanations.
To help streamline this communication, MECANO ID selected Dassault Systèmes’ 3D modeling software, CATIA, to improve the efficiency of its product design process and its 3D documentation tool, 3DVIA Composer, to improve the ways that it could share and explain these designs and data with customers, partners and suppliers.
Building & Communicating In 3D
One project involved heating samples of Martian soil to extract amino acids and determine if life once existed on the planet. The heating device, which consisted of a small cup containing samples and a heating system, was designed using CATIA. As the project evolved, lightweight 3D interactive product information and technical documentation was created in parallel using 3DVIA Composer.
3DVIA Composer enabled an easy information exchange, preparing materials to facilitate the review of the product design, and using its interactive animation capabilities to explain key product functions and features to the customer.
Since eighty percent of development costs depend on decisions made in the first twenty percent of a project, it is essential that information reaches participants as early as possible before costs become prohibitive. 3DVIA Composer made it possible to share valuable product information with all of the participants during the early stages of a project, thereby improving decision-making efficiency.
Since MECANO ID’s partners are located all over the world, they use non-visually oriented teleconferencing as the primary method of communication. Detailed and up-to-date documentation created in 3DVIA Composer was uploaded and made accessible to all workstations, making it easy to review and communicate the status and to explain the elements of the latest design.
In addition, 3DVIA Composer has protections integrated into the exchanged executable files (such as the blurring of sensitive areas and/or restricting use to a defined timeframe), easing the intellectual property (IP) theft worries of any company and making it possible to securely share important company IP.
MECANO ID is also a major supplier for satellite manufacturer Thales Alenia Space and is responsible for configuring its telecommunications satellite repeaters. The design office uses 3DVIA Composer to prepare information for the integration phase. Before working with 3DVIA, the company was using 2D drawings (paper plans), which were terribly inefficient.
However, with 3DVIA, the paper plans have been entirely replaced by interactive 3D documentation. Since standardizing on 3D, the volume of information that is available is greater, more reliable, more comprehensible and can be obtained more quickly than ever before.
Results
MECANO ID now has sixteen expert designers using seven CATIA workstations—a number that is expected to double by late 2009. The company is enhancing its services offering by developing a composites service, to meet the considerable demand in the space sector for composite materials (especially those that are carbon fiber-based and whose properties meet the needs for stiffness as well as dimensional stability versus temperature and mechanical resistance).
MECANO ID’s tools are now all equipped with 3D technologies, making it possible to design what couldn’t have been designed before—all while reducing costs by improving communications across oceans and language barriers.