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The Challenge
In the early 2000’s, as a manufacturer of aluminum molds, Carroll
Industrial Molds, Inc. found SolidWorks becoming the standard design package in the foam molding industry. Carroll Industrial Molds was beginning to notice their customers delivering files to them in SolidWorks. In response, Craig Dusing, President of Carroll Industrial Molds, decided it was time to invest in new software that would not only fit their company’s needs, but the needs of their customers as well.
In response to industry and customer demands, Carroll Industrial Molds elected to partner with Computer Aided Technology, Inc (CATI) for the proper software solutions. Together, Carroll Industrial Molds and CATI found that the combination of SolidWorks and SolidProfessor was the right software to fit their needs. .
The Solution
SolidWorks has allowed Carroll Industrial Molds to convert tooling designs that were once either 2D designs done in AutoCAD or paper drawings, into 3D models that can be directly passed to SURFCAM. This has greatly improved efficiency as well as had a noticeable impact on their error rate. “Being able to see the final mold in position in our customer’s press equipment and in solid modeling definitely eliminated a tremendous amount of errors,” said Craig.
According to Craig, he had a couple designers who were self taught in SolidWorks so purchasing SolidProfessor as a training aid made a lot of sense. One aspect of the SolidProfessor training program that has been especially useful to Carroll Industrial Molds is its 24/7 accessibility. Craig’s main designer has found SolidProfessor especially helpful as a great supplement to hands on training. In addition, Craig plans to train a few new employees in SolidWorks, from scratch, and SolidProfessor will be vital in that process.
For Carroll Industrial Molds, SolidWorks and SolidProfessor has been fundamental for driving their success in the past few years. The savings they have experienced has been invaluable to Craig and his company. “I now have two people assembling the same number of molds I had ten or twelve people doing by hand. Our quality has increased tremendously, our error rates are virtually zero by having the ability to design these things [molds] online.” For Carroll Industrial Molds and Craig Dusing, SolidWorks and SolidProfessor has, “virtually completely changed our business.”
Summary and Metrics
- Error rates close to zero
- Quality has increased
- Efficiency has increased while number of designers has decreased
- Thirteen employees doing more volume than twenty five
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