The challenge
Finnish company Citec Oy Ab with offices in Finland and India is a multi-disciplinary engineering company with around 1,000 employees. The company specializes in providing designing and information management services for clients in several sectors such as energy and power, the process industry, and manufacturing and healthcare. Their ambition is to be a one-stop shop that can offer both the best tools and best practices.
The solution
Citec Oy AB has chosen to use SolidWorks Composer from PLM Group because the system makes it possible for the company to directly reuse 3D models from the customers’ various CAD systems to create many different types of technical documentation, explains Juha Rintala, team leader for Citec Oy AB visualization team: “With SolidWorks Composer, we have been able to streamline the processes producing for instance manuals for assembly and maintenance, training materials and spare parts catalogs. We seek to keep the cost per page for technical documentation as low as possible and the efficiency we have achieved with SolidWorks Composer means that we have become very competitive on the production of technical documentation for our customers.”
Juha Rintala explains that earlier it would take two to three conversions to prepare 3D CAD models for the systems that were used to create technical documentation. Now the CAD models are used directly to quickly create the desired 3D mock-up and at the same time, the possible loss of data in the conversion process has been eliminated.
“The system also automatically ensures that we are constantly working with updated 3D CAD models, which means that we do not have to start all over again when a model is updated. This has eliminated much tedious repetitive work. Previously, both we and our customers spent a lot of time doing checkups and sending emails back and forth. This is past tense now,” he says.
Juha Rintala also emphasizes that the direct reuse of the original CAD models helps to create closer integration between Citec Oy Ab and its customers and makes cooperation easier and more dynamic: “It’s a perfect fit in our way of thinking in having a partnership with our customers.”
Juha Rintala underlines that the streamlined workflow has caused huge time savings: “We can do the same tasks in one-third of the time we previously were using. With SolidWorks Composer the total time spent on the visualization tasks has been reduced even by up to 60 percent for both ourselves and our customers,” he explains.
Likewise, SolidWorks Composer has helped to make the internal cooperation closer and more flexible, because the system has made it possible for specialists in the engineering and visualization team to work together on the same tasks,” says Juha Rintala.
The success
- With SolidWorks Composer the document preparation time is reduced by 60 percent
- Risk of loss of data eliminated
- Easier and more dynamic cooperation with customers
- Internal cooperation is now closer and more flexible