CASE STUDY: Collaborative design solves potential warpage problem

Aptec, a design firm in Florida that specializes in plastic products, was an early adopter of the OneSpace technology, and has used it to great benefit on a number of projects.

“With OneSpace, we’re inviting more people to the table closer to the start of the product development cycle,” explains Tom Morris, Aptec’s chief information officer.

For example, a recent project to design a package for a multi-CD training software product involved the client in Oklahoma, a molder in Florida, a moldmaker in Wisconsin and a material supplier in Pennsylvania.

The project had a window of five months from conception to production.

“OneSpace is an enabler for front-end engineering. In this case, once we had settled on a design, our injection molding simulation found a tendency for the long front edge to warp inward.

“We pulled the mold design into OneSpace to discuss the problem with all parties: the client, the molder, the moldmaker, the material supplier. Everybody saw and understood the problem and we had immediate buy-in that it had to be fixed. In one hour, we had a plan for countermeasures involving the mold design,” recalls Morris.

The cooling system was redesigned, and warp was reduced by 75 percent. In addition, cycle time dropped by 20 percent.

“The most important factor about using OneSpace in this situation is that all the parties were discussing things at the same time (without anyone jumping on a plane). Political land mines are diffused and there’s no finger pointing because everyone participates and everyone buys in to the solution.”