Oiles America Corporation is the international leader in self-lubricated bearing technology.

Oiles is a technology oriented manufacturing company that continues to focus on responding to customer’s design, testing and manufacturing needs for self lubricated bearings.

Oiles produces self-lubricating, maintenance free & reliable bushings which are offered in flanged & straight plain bearings, washers & plates. Oiles products provide superior performance in areas that require long-term maintenance-free use.

How Are You Using DriveWorks?

“The current configurator takes a very robust product and design standard and places it out on the web where anyone can design a multi-layer bearing with our proprietary materials. When the design is complete it is checked against our existing catalogue parts that are close to the customer design to provide a lower cost and quicker turnaround time than a made to order part.” Ray McDaniel— CAD Engineer

How Did You ‘Design to Order’ Before You Had DriveWorks?

Before using DriveWorks, the Account Manager received a quote request containing a drawing along with preliminary information. A Microsoft Project was then created by the Program Manager who uploaded the drawing and preliminary information. An Applications Engineer was then tasked with performing the Application Feasibility.

Bushing material and optimal design, if needed, was recommended based on the application information. The AE also ensured that the provided drawing contained adequate information to fully manufacture the bushing. If needed, the drawing was marked up to reflect the recommendations.

After the AE Feasibility, the drawing went through manufacturing, quality, and planning feasibility. The last step of the process was costing which was completed by the Program Manager. The bushing was costed and the pricing was then provided to the Account Manager for mark up. Once this was completed the price was then submitted to the customer.

What are the Benefits of Using DriveWorks for You and Your Customers?

Using DriveWorks has helped Oiles America Corporation to:
– Provide a quicker response time
– Increase sales opportunities
– Generate sales leads
– Reduce engineering and CAD times
– Reduce errors and the need for error checking

“External customers also benefit from the ability to input their information directly into the design automation web interface and get back complete bearing design or a catalogue part that will work for their requirements error free within seconds. Our internal staff should be able to use DriveWorks in the same manner to reduce errors and engineering review time.”

Overall, What’s the Most Important Thing About DriveWorks for Oiles America Corporation?

“We value many things about DriveWorks. Most importantly is the ability to take a design standard and use the configurator software to produce an error free streamlined custom bearing design.

Also the ability to leverage software we are already using such as SOLIDWORKS and PDM Professional and the ability to integrate with our enterprise resource planning (ERP) software systems and customer relationship management (CRM) software systems all while giving you a web presence.”

Adopting DriveWorks

In order to help them adopt DriveWorks, Oiles regularly use the many online resources available in the DriveWorks Community and attend the Tech Team Thursday webinars.

Ray McDaniel has also attended DriveWorks World, the annual value added technical event for DriveWorks users.

Oiles have also been working with EpiGrid—a DriveWorks Hosting Partner.
“EpiGrid is a valued partner that has provided a hosted environment for both SOLIDWORKS PDM and DriveWorks for Oiles America Corporation. EpiGrid remains a company that we plan on working with as more products come online.”

Oiles’ customers benefit from the ability to input their information directly into the design automation web interface and get back a complete bearing design or catalogue part that will work for their requirements error free.

Recently whilst Rob, Technical Marketing at DriveWorks, was working on creating new documents for the DriveWorks Cupboard demo, he came across an issue with images in Excel documents.

If you drive an Excel document that contains an image and then save a PDF, the image in the PDF document will have the wrong aspect ratio.

After some research, Rob found that this is a known issue with Excel.

The good news is that you can increase the height of the image by 10% in the master document, so that the image in the generated PDF document is the correct aspect ratio.

Here’s how it’s done:
1 – Insert your image

2 – Select the image and then click Format in the task bar

3 – Click the arrow in the bottom corner to access additional size options

4 – Uncheck ‘Lock Aspect Ratio’ and increase the height of the image to 110%. This will stretch your image

5 – Once you’ve increased the height of the image, check ‘Lock Aspect Ratio’ again. This will ensure that the height is always 10% larger than the width if you resize the image.

6 – Run a new Specification and check the PDF

This is only applicable to PDF documents. If you’re not saving your Excel document as a PDF, you don’t need to make any changes!

Over the course of the last few months Heather has been presenting about DriveWorks at SOLIDWORKS User group meetings that have taken her from Boston to Seattle.

She’s really enjoyed getting to know the user groups and has found that the common element in all of these meetings is the same – the passion for design and supporting each other.

It was no surprise that Heather’s visit to the New York City SOLIDWORKS User Group (NYCSWUG) meeting on July 13, 2016 held the same level of passion and energy.

A SWUG Meeting in the City That Never Sleeps…

“On Wednesday, the streets of New York City were jam packed with tourists and businessmen working their way through the 90-degree heat. Upon arriving at the School of Visual Arts, we met with Matt Rohr, the group leader for the NYC SWUG. After a brief tour of the school and seeing work being done by the students, the crowds gathered as we dined on sandwiches and bottles of water – no pizza (or bacon) in sight!

The evening’s agenda was full of great presentations – Earl Hasz provided an overview of SOLIDWORKS Electrical, while Arthur Young-Spivey provided an engaging comparison of rendering capacities of PhotoView 360 and SOLIDWORKS Visualize.

Between these two presentations, I gave a presentation of DriveWorks and DriveWorksXpress. This was a great opportunity to tell the users a bit more about DriveWorks, our company and how to activate DriveWorksXpress – the free design automation tool included in every seat of SOLIDWORKS. At the end of the meeting, DriveWorks raffled off an Amazon Fire Tablet which was won by Alex Liew.

In addition to hosting a successful meeting, there were user group leaders in attendance from other parts of the country – joining in that evening were Ed Gebo, Connecticut (CONNSWUG), David Antanavige, Long Island, New York (LISWUG) and Chris Wurtele all the way from Omaha, Nebraska (ONSWUG).

When these leaders go out of their way to attend and support another group or make it part of their vacation plans it truly speaks to the strength of the SOLIDWORKS User Group Community and we are proud to be a part of that.”

Recently we blogged about how our Tech Team Manager, Phil, created a really cool DriveWorks project to automate the Fantasy Football league for the European Championship.

The European Championship is an international football competition that takes place every four years. This year 24 teams took part. The tournament was hosted in France, and the host nation were also the favourites to win the trophy.

There’s been a real buzz in the office and a lot of the team took part in the competition. After everyone had drafted their teams, we had to wait for the tournament to start.

Watching the Points Roll in!

Once our tournament kicked off we all eagerly awaited our regular updates from Phil to say how many points our players has scored. After a few games it was clear who picked a great team….and who didn’t.

There was a lot of competition between our Tech Team to be at the top of the leader board and it was quite often the talk of the office.

And the Winner is…

After the final match had taken place, the scores looked like this:

Phil – 177
Chris – 172
Mark – 165
Maria – 149
Karl – 124
Ian – 97
John – 81
Glen – 75
Danielle – 66
Dave – 63
Jessica – 60
Rob – 54

Phil came in first place with a huge 177 points thanks to his team of great players! He also very generously donated his winnings to sponsor the DriveWorks memory walk in aid of Alzheimer’s Society.

We all enjoyed taking part and Phil will now continue to work on the project ready for the World Cup in 2018!

If you didn’t join us for our DriveWorks World 2017 location reveal webinar then you wont know that DriveWorks World 2017 will be in…

ATLANTA

Go to www.driveworksworld.com now to register!

Thank you for your interest in attending DriveWorks World 2017.

Our annual technical event is the perfect place for you to learn more, enhance your projects and become certified.

The links below include letter templates that you can use to help justify your attendance to DriveWorks World 2017.

These letters will outline the value that attending DriveWorks World provides not just to you, but to your entire organization.

DriveWorks World 2017 Justification Letters

Choose the letter below that applies to you and simply copy and paste the text into an email or word document and fill in the blanks.

Customer Justification Track One

Customer Justification Track Two

Reseller Justification Track One

Reseller Justification Track Two

MHB develop and produce high quality steel windows, doors and facades. Their motto is ‘More Light’ and they create windows and doors that do indeed provide more light due to the specially developed steel profiles.

Over 3 generations, the family run business has grown into a flourishing organization. They now employ over 200 professionals working from their headquarters in Herveld, the Netherlands.

MHB developed the special facades of the Music Building in Amsterdam, the particle accelerator at the Technical University in Eindhoven and the office of the Dutch Department of Public Works.

Implementing DriveWorks

To make a clearer distinction between standard products and customer-specific projects, MHB implemented a DriveWorks configurator. Michel van Kerkhof, Head of Innovations at MHB, explains: “Because previously each product was designed from scratch by our engineers, we always tended to go along with specific customer wishes. Therefore, we wanted to implement a clear standard segment by means of a configurator.”

With DriveWorks, a variety of standardized made-to-measure products can be designed. Because there’s no engineer involved in these projects anymore, this standardized assortment can be offered in a lower price segment. This way, MHB has been able to add a whole new product category to their portfolio.

Partnerships

MHB works with partners that are located all over the world. They are the channel between MHB and the customer and therefore they are the ones that use the DriveWorks configurator.

“Our partners simply fill out a form on the internet, which then automatically generates all necessary documents. We started the implementation with a select group. By now, all our partners use the configurator, to their full satisfaction”

The Configurator

Customers can put a complete facade together using the DriveWorks configurator.

“DriveWorks generates a steel frame of 12×9 squared that forms the basis for every facade. Each square can be filled in as desired: facade, door or window.

Customers can also choose the type of doors and windows, as well as various properties such as glass type, glazing bar and opening inwards or outwards.” – Michel van Kerkhof.

This way facades can still be composed upon customer specification, using standardized parts.

The Benefits

Working with DriveWorks saves MHB a lot of time compared to the old process: “Previously, the customer told us his wishes based on sketches, after which we put a calculator to work to compute a price. Only after the final order was given, an engineer came into play. With DriveWorks, all documents are already finished at the moment that the customer receives a quotation.”

DriveWorks directly generates quotations, drawings and specification lists for MHB. Besides that, the ERP system is filled with all necessary production data.

“With DriveWorks, all our documents are ready within an hour, whilst previously this could take over 4 weeks, depending on how busy we were.”

Moogue use DriveWorks as a Sales Configurator to allow anyone to configure custom 3D printed phone cases. They are based in the Netherlands and create their customizable phone cases using a 3D printer.

Using DriveWorks Pro as a Sales Configurator enables Moogue to offer custom designed phone cases online, to exact specifications.

We spoke to Thijs Vernooij to find out more…

So How Did Moogue begin?

“We experienced in our own lives that everyone wants the freedom of choice of the products we use every day. The people don’t want the standard or mainstream products anymore. Just by coincidence, we were talking about this and decided to roll the idea out for creating customized products.”

Moogue’s Customers

Who is your target audience?
“Our target are unique people with a strong character, old and young and those who know what they like.
On top of that, we’re also facing companies who would have their logo, or company profile on our products – just like DriveWorks.”

How do you give your customers exactly what they want?
“We believe that consumers really know what they want and what they don`t want. That’s why we’ve created a platform where you can design your own products. The first result of this, is www.3dphonecase.com“

Technologies

How long did it take you to develop the Moogue business and website?
“The whole idea and project has been running for about 3 years now. Starting the business and creating the website took about 12 months developing time.”

How easy is it to add a case to the Moogue range when a new phone is released to the market?
“It’s still quite a lot of work because we want to have a perfect fit and protection of our cases, so every phone needs a bit of developing time. We are improving our projects to decrease the time to market.”

What technologies are you using?
“Basically SolidWorks, DriveWorks, and some other website, webshop and Microsoft techniques.”

Why did you choose these technologies?
“The software we chose gave us the opportunity to create and develop our plans. It covered 3D-design, automated creation of models, and the web-based view for our customers.”

How did you develop the Moogue phone case configurator?
“With lots of trial and error, and great support from Design Solutions, our DriveWorks Reseller.”

3D Printing

Customers can design the phone cases online from the comfort of their own home but where do you print them?
“We are printing at a location in the Netherlands”

Do you expect to have multiple Moogue printing facilities across the world?
“To decrease the delivery time, we might print on different locations in the world. We will only do this though if we are sure that the quality will be the same or better. This is very important for us.”

What 3D printers are you using?
“The accuracy we need for our products is very high. We can’t just use the home desktop printers for our product so we are using professional HD SLS 3D Printers.”

How long does it take to print each phone case?
“Normally it takes about 24 hours to print a full batch, cooling down time included.”

Moogue’s Future

What challenges do you face?
“We are still looking for smart and creative people who would like to work together with us. Not only for creating cool designs, but also have software and website talents.”

What are Moogue’s plans for the future?
“Our plan is to launch many more products and sites where people can create their own product. We are facing a future where everyone wants to personalize and design their own products. We are looking for the next product to add to the Moogue brand, while also adding more designs and other brands to the phone cases website.”