For a small, family-owned company in Lexington, Ky., keeping up with the competition is a continual business endeavor. Q-Lighting, a manufacturer of specialty lighting products, needed to reduce its prototype model production costs by more than 90 percent and reduce time-to-assembly to help them beat their competition to market.
Q-Lighting designs and produces portable and wearable lights used by electricians, mechanics and other technicians who need to illuminate small items in poorly lit areas. About 40 employees work in the assembly plant where the lights are hand-built with specially manufactured parts from proprietary designs.
As the company expanded sales to specialty distribution outlets like Ace Hardware and Eddie Bauer, they needed to improve design turnaround time to keep up with customization requests. The challenge was to shrink time-to-assembly and at the same time eliminate massive part modeling costs. Most of the parts Q–Lighting uses are plastic and require molds for manufacturing. The process of transforming a 2D drawing into a mold drained valuable resources
3D Prototyping Lights The Way
Q-Lighting turned to Avatech Solutions, an engineering systems integrator, to provide the systems that would help them cut costs, save time and improve assembly efficiency.
Avatech's senior application expert, Carl Smith, moved the company from Autodesk AutoCAD to Autodesk Mechanical Desktop and then to Autodesk Inventor to take advantage of the product’s new 3D capabilities.
Q-Lighting had hundreds of components already created in Autodesk's Mechanical Desktop and did not want to lose that work. Avatech saved Q-Lighting's work by helping them to convert the geometry and providing customized title blocks and fonts using company standards. This turnkey solution enabled Q-Lighting's designers to concentrate on new work and innovation — not on details which were easily standardized.
“Using Autodesk Inventor, our rapid prototyping machine, and Avatech’s expertise, we have literally reduced time-to-market for some products from two years to six months. The speed of the design-to-model process has improved significantly and the 3D visual representation has been fantastic, allowing us to reduce interferences and get a lot more done in a shorter period of time,” said Ira Cooper, Q-Lighting's owner and president.
Seeing Autodesk Inventor’s ability to reduce the cost of modeling, Cooper decided to complement it by acquiring an in-house rapid prototyping machine. Now, the engineering team generates 3D files for a new product and tests it virtually — all in Autodesk Inventor. When the team is satisfied with the result, they send the Autodesk Inventor file to the rapid prototyping machine which generates a physical 3D model.
… And Saves Money, Too
“Virtual testing and creating physical models allows us to easily see whether the assembly will work prior to creating new parts. Now, instead of spending $30,000 for a fully built out working 3D model, it costs us around $700 in materials, plus our time -- and we control the process,” said Cooper.
“Because we are one of the last family-owned businesses in this market, we need every possible advantage to maintain an edge on our competition,” said Ira Cooper. “This new process with virtual testing capabilities in Autodesk Inventor, and the rapid prototype machine makes us an extremely efficient design organization, helping us to get our products on the shelf before our largest competitors.”
From 2D To 3D
Many parts Q–Lighting uses to house their electronics snap together. Different tolerances for the snap shafts and their corresponding holes are used for different purposes. With Autodesk Inventor, Q-Lighting's designers can be assured that if they change a shaft diameter, the hole will resize to accommodate the change.
“This let’s us quickly adapt an existing part for a new product, without having to do the math, because Autodesk Inventor does the work for us,” explained Cooper
“Working in 2D is slow. It is a drafting process, not a design process. If you miss a detail on a design, or don’t remember to change a layer, you get problems. Autodesk Inventor does away with all that by automating updates,” commented David Russell, Q-Lighting's design engineer. “We are not a big company and don’t have a huge design department, so Autodesk Inventor makes us faster and more efficient.”
From the design department’s work, Autodesk Inventor helps produce assembly instructions – publishing the exploded views directly from parts information. Similarly, the web site, through which Q–Lighting sells products direct to consumers, also takes advantage of Autodesk Inventor studio drawings.
Beating The Competition
The company is enjoying the benefits that Avatech has helped them achieve. “Q–Lighting has 16 new products in development and we know we can get them to market quicker than ever before,” said Russell.
“We look forward to working with Avatech to produce innovative new designs that take advantage of design re-use and produce complete assemblies in far less time,” Cooper concluded.