Lean engineering spurs innovative high-tech machine development

Optima Group already relies on 250 seats of CoCreate OneSpace Modeling for product development – originally chosen instead of a traditional history-based 3D CAD system because of its ability to handle assemblies made up of 50,000 parts or more. The company also says it likes CoCreate’s dynamic modelling-based approach to product design because of the resulting flexibility and speed it affords. “Our customers often request changes very late in the design process,” explains Jochen Schaile, CAD manager at Optima. “With the dynamic modelling approach, any designer can pick up any project and go straight to work making those changes. You don’t have to know anything about how a design started out to take it any direction you need to go.” Hence Optima’s decision to buy CoCreate’s data management product and build out its PLM environment. With engineers working across Germany, the US, Japan, Mexico, Italy, Brazil, France, Korea and the UK, it says it needed to know that anyone could find, load, work on and store large files, without fear of overwriting or using outdated material. With OneSpace Model Manager, product development becomes centrally managed and the theory is that information flows throughout the company. “Optima customers rely on our evolving technology,” says Schaile. “Our product development environment must be integrated within our organization. We won’t sacrifice time or effort on incompatible systems. Rather, we let the seamless integration between product development and manufacturing systems work for us to automate exchanges in the PLM process.”