Shotton Group are a family owned business with four divisions operating across Australia. Established in 1977, they began as suppliers of sheet metal and then diversified to create and sell their own products.
Shotton Group are a family owned business with four divisions operating across Australia. Established in 1977, they began as suppliers of sheet metal and then diversified to create and sell their own products.
In 2010, the company founded Shotton Lifts, becoming the only local manufacturer of residential, commercial and disabled access lifts in Melbourne, Australia.
We recently caught up with their Engineering Manager, Martin Clenick, who explained how theyre using DriveWorks to configure their custom lifts.
When configuring a new lift, we used to rely on finding a similar lift that we had already modelled in SOLIDWORKS. Wed then package up the project and our engineers would make any modifications manually.
By the end of the process, we would have gigabytes of duplicated SOLIDWORKS files and we never knew if there were any obsolete parts in the models.
We needed a solution that would automate the repetitive tasks, streamline the production of sales documentation and prevent us duplicating data.
A typical lift contains somewhere in the region of 500- 600 parts and they can be specified into an infinite number of configurations. The number of floors, supporting structures and the types of doors are things which commonly change depending on the type of lift required.
The DriveWorks configurator that weve developed automates the configuration of our custom lifts and its used internally by our engineers and our sales team.
Our engineers use the configurator to specify new lifts and to automate the generation of engineering drawings, whilst our sales team use it to complete forms and to produce professional sales documents, quotes and bills of materials (BOMS).
Were currently using the DriveWorks BOM to Excel plugin to import the generated information from an Excel spreadsheet directly in to our ERP system says Martin.
An engineering drawing generated by DriveWorks.
Prior to using DriveWorks, there were many forms for our sales and engineering teams to complete.Each form had different formatting and revision controls and we had issues with manual data entry.
Now that all of our forms are generated through DriveWorks, they are much more professional and cohesive. Were now able to include more customised fields in the documentation that would have been impractical in the past.
With DriveWorks, the risk of human error has also been greatly reduced and weve eliminated duplication of data. Previously, an approval drawing could take around half an hour of engineering time and completing other forms would take a couple of hours.
Using DriveWorks, weve reduced the amount of time taken to complete forms from half a day to only 30 minutes.
Shortly, our sales people will have the ability to configure lifts on an iPad whilst theyre on site and the customer will have their proposal within minutes.
After weve achieved this, our next step is to publish the lift configurator on our website and allow customers to configure their lifts in a browser.
In the future, were aiming to expand our lifts business and introduce DriveWorks to other business areas in The Shotton Group. Wed like our engineers to spend more time on R&D and less time on repetitive tasks, DriveWorks is the tool to help us achieve this!
We started working with Steve Gallienne of 3D4 Industry around 18 months ago.
Steve has been extremely valuable in pointing us in the right direction and hes recently been working in-house to help us develop our DriveWorks project. Without Steves help we would still be replacing elements in our original project from scratch, when we had time.
Im now confident that were heading in the right direction and seeing some real wins for the company!
– Martin Clenick, Engineering Manager at Shotton Group.
For more information about Shotton Group and their products, visit: www.shottongroup.com.au
Every year the DriveWorks team get together for a Summer Party. Usuallythe party takes place at Maria and Glen’s house and last year we alsocelebrated Glen’s birthday.
After the success of theDriveWorks World social evening, we decided to have the party here at our offices this year!
Although it was strange coming into work on a Saturday, the DriveWorks team came along and brought friends and family with them too.
It was good timing for a party as last year’s cohort of placement students are preparing to return to university for their final year of study, whilst the next round have just joined our team.
It was a great way to wave goodbye to the students who have contributed so much over the last year, and welcome onboard the new students.
Automation IPA made a comeback and this time we brewed it as a team.
We spent the afternoon playing games together, including hula hoop and limbo!
We also played video games, pool, giant jenga and connect 4.
We enjoyed delicious woodfired pizzas, served from a cool vintage van.
And of course, it wouldn’t be a DriveWorks team party without Ruby!
DriveWorks 16 SP1 was released on 20th August 2018 and its available to download from the DriveWorks Community.
In DriveWorks 16 we built on our extensive Design Automation capabilities, greatly enhanced our 3D capabilities and made sure DriveWorks is positioned as a powerful configurator and CPQ solution company-wide for manufacturing companies.
Our developers have added some new features and updated code which has been tested rigorously by our tech team. SP1 is now available to download from the DriveWorks Community.
Ambient Occlusionis a camera effect that can be enabled on the Default Camera or any Camera Entity added to a 3D Document.
Ambient Occlusion is a shading and rendering technique used to approximate how exposed each point in a scene is to ambient lighting. It darkens creases, holes, intersections and surfaces that are close to each other. In real life, these areas tend to block or occlude ambient light, therefore they appear darker.
FsGetURLis a new function that makes it easy to show Specification Documents in a browser.
Once you havegiven it a path to a file located on your hard drive, the FsGetURL function will return a URL for the file.This resource URL can be used in a Web Frame Control or a Hyperlink Control to display or download the specified file.
NewData Management Tasks inthe Copy Groupand Pack and Go features allow a configuration file to be saved with all the settings applied during the wizard process.This allows the same settings to be instantly run when the tasks are required in future.
SQL Server Data Export and ODBC Data Export Document UI has been updated to better support high resolution monitors.
The DriveWorks online help files have been updated with more information about this latest service pack:
Each year thePan-Mass Challengebrings together thousands of impassioned cyclists, committed volunteers, generous donors and dedicated corporate sponsors.
The aim is to raise money for cancer research and since it was first started in 1980, the Pan-Mass Challenge (PMC) has contributed $598 million to lifesaving cancer research and treatment at the Dana Farber Institute.
On Friday 3rd August 2018, Heather from the DriveWorks team volunteered at this event for her 6th year. Heather’s husband Earl also rode with his son Ethan on Team Dassault.
Team Dassault has raised more than $6.6 million for this cause over 16 years!
Although the rest of the DriveWorks team couldn’t be there in person to participate, we were cheering Heather and her family on from our office in the UK – well done!
visitwww.pmc.orgfor more information.
Through its operations around the world, across building and infrastructure sectors, Laing ORourke aims to secure its position as the recognised leader for innovation and excellence in the construction industry.
Recently, Laing ORourke collaborated with Tony Gee and Partners and Cambridge University to develop a unified digital delivery process for the bridge industry. The project configures bridge designs from a set of key inputs and a library of parametric components.
The key focus of the project is to create a common standard by synchronising data and protocols. The aim is to improve interoperability between different parts of the bridge building process.
The project integrates best practices for manufacturing, assembly and design, to ensure consistent data formats and reduce manual processes required between stages.
For this to happen, naming conventions and output files from each stage of the process need to be structured and arranged in a systematic way. Using DriveWorks, Laing ORourke can specify rules to determine how and where each file is saved.
‘Before and after: a SOLIDWORKS render of a bridge compared to a photograph of the bridge taken immediately following construction
Laing ORourke was the lead partner of the research project consortium and they offered extensive experience in logistics, building designed structures, manufacturing through to site transportation, installation and handover.
Tony Gee and Partners provided valuable insight related to design codes, engineering calculations, materials and design options. The University of Cambridge offered technical experience into state of the art methods for design optimisation and data structuring.
In 2014, Innovate UK, the governments innovation agency, announced a 贈5.6 million funding competition, drawing on the UKs evolving expertise in Building Information Modelling (BIM) enterprise. Laing ORourkes collaborative research project received funding support from Innovate UK, which was a strong catalyst for them to start developing a set of design configuration tools for bridges.
The project uses standards to simplify bridge processes and reduce the time it takes to complete a bridge. The current design process is complex and typically a fully detailed design would take around 30 weeks to complete
By digitising the design process with this project, Laing ORourke has identified savings that could see bridge designs produced in days or weeks instead of months or years.
The design configuration tools, created using SOLIDWORKS and DriveWorks, provide a smoother digital process for the design, manufacture and assembly of components, which reduces the time it takes to complete a bridge.
At DriveWorks World 2018, Laing ORourkes Digital Engineering Leader, Dr Scott McGovern, told us more about how the project uses DriveWorks.
We wanted to implement a system that gave users the ability to make informed decisions so they could quickly see the impact of their decisions on the overall design.
Were using DriveWorks in three main areas within our toolset. Firstly, we used the software to build the user interface and capture user defined inputs. We then linked these inputs into our structured dataset that would drive the rules to define component dimensions and features.
Finally, we utilised DriveWorks design automation capabilities to automate the development of model assemblies and engineering drawings of the bridge.
By using DriveWorks and SOLIDWORKS, we hope that we will be able to dramatically reduce the time taken to reach the final design of a bridge.
This has several benefits as the impact of decisions can be investigated much earlier in the process and reduce the many design iteration cycles that are currently undertaken.
The impact of design on cost will be quickly realised. This allows the design to be truly informed by cost rather than the traditional process of costing up a design.
Construction times are likely to be made shorter and component selections will be finalised earlier, this eliminates the need for last minute design changes and reduces delivery risk on the project.
Bridge design will be simplified to a component led solution, allowing greater ability for design optimisation of the individual components that make up the kit of parts.
Dr Scott McGovern, Digital Engineering Leader at Laing ORourke, presenting at DriveWorks World 2018.
Our extensive experience in designing for manufacturing and digital engineering allowed us to take the lead when developing the toolset for the research project. There are two key parts to the toolset: the data and the software tools.We structured the data to provide a reusable set of digital assets, but this alone does not make up the tools.
DriveWorks has allowed us to automate the routine processes that we undertake on this data, day in and day out, with traditional bridge design. This automatic creation of models and drawings rapidly improves the turnaround time to reach sign-off on designs and makes all of the downstream benefits possible.
