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Valve Automation Kits: Driving Down Design Time

Select the specific valve and actuator from a pull down list, answer a couple of pre-determined questions and DriveWorks designs the kit!

Founded in 1994, VanAires reputation for quality, service and price has produced a growing demand for its products and services. We had the customer base, industry base, and manufacturing capabilities to allow more growth but we were always lacking the ability to design fast enough whilst ensuring accuracy. Until now, the design process has been the number one bottleneck to additional growth at VanAire.

VanAire knew that just hiring more CAD professionals was not the answer. VanAire has always looked first at investing in technology and automation to solve capacity problems instead of throwing bodies at them.We never considered automating our design process to this extent until we saw SolidWorks and DriveWorks. With the prior CAD system, there were many months of training and then supervising new designers. Once trained, VanAire had to rely on the designers or QC departments memory to ensure that the designs met the requirements for particular Valve to Actuator combinations and/or specific customers requirements.

The design process took about 45 minutes; this included gathering required data from spec sheets, designing from scratch, checking, printing and then filing. During this process VanAire had to rely on the CAD department to gather the correct dimensional data, manually type in the information correctly each time, AND design the kit using the latest policies in the quickest amount of time.This fragmented and manual process also had the potential for errors.

This whole process now takes less than two minutes. The end result is a 3D model and shop drawings that are generated automatically and guaranteed to be correct because they are based on VanAires current rules.

However, with SolidWorks and DriveWorks, VanAire is able to solve many of the above issues and address many more..

DriveWorks allows VanAire to Design kits based on current rules, current Valve and Actuator dimensions, and customer expectations that were previously entered into a database.

Using the DriveWorks friendly interface, a user now selects the specific valve and actuator from a pull down list, answers a couple of pre-determined questions and DriveWorks designs the kit.

This whole process now takes less than two minutes. The end result is a 3D model and shop drawings that are generated automatically and guaranteed to be correct because they are based on VanAires current rules.

There is higher quality output through reduction in data-entry errors, as well as improved profitability through generation of more accurate outputs.