Success Story

Alibre Brings Concurrent Design to Kaon Consulting

“We need to do concurrent design among a team.  We’re working with complex assemblies of about 150 parts, with different designers working on different subassemblies.  At all times, we need to have the whole of the product in view.  And that’s why we needed Alibre Team Design Server.  It has enabled us to do concurrent design,” says David Murray, head of product development at the Queensland-based Kaon Consulting. 

Murray’s new company focuses on helping others reduce waste in their processes, including lean manufacturing, change consulting, and sometimes full end-to-end redesign of client’s products to make them quicker and cheaper to mass produce.  For the latter, a team of six designers split up the work of mechanism design, electric circuits, and sheet metal parts to create new industrial scale electrical equipment.

Alibre Team Design Server joins multiple seats of the Alibre Design solid modeler into an effective design management network, stored independently on the consultancy’s own internal server.  With Alibre's unique peer-to-peer technology, multiple Alibre Design users can spontaneously communicate and work directly on the same sketch, model, or drawing in real time, as well as share project data with each other.

“The enabling factor is huge,’ says Murray.  “The Team Design Server allows us to share design tasks and gives us visibility of other designers’ work.  It allows to partition the job between people very effectively.  And it allows us to have controlled updating. It really is a nice product, and it is actually a lot faster than using a regular file storage.”

Murray finds that the “check-in/check-out” option of the Team Design Server data sharing mechanism to be the essential solution for versioning control while sharing part models for large projects.  The server maintains a master assembly of the entire product.   Designers can “check out” 3D solid models to work on parts and subassemblies, confident that their changes will be saved without being overwritten.  The process of design can proceed without the confusion that comes with multiple versions from different engineers. 

“It allows you to block other users from touching your work,” explains Murray.  “You check something out, which that means other people can’t change it.  You put your foot on it, so to speak.  Better than that, it lets other people see you put your foot on it.  They can go and try to check the part out, and they see oh, that’s no good, David has that checked out.  Then you can engage in a dialogue through the software: ‘why?  What are you doing?   How long do you have it checked out for?’  The other cleverness about the check-in/check-out scheme is that the intermediate changes you’re making as you’re working don’t become visible to the other team members until you check it back in.”

The simple-to-install server tool from Alibre gave the company an easy way to achieve concurrent design and free collaboration, while closely managing 3D models of  large, long-term projects. “It’s a beautiful tool,” says Murray, “we’re very happy with it.”

The new startup’s decision to invest in Alibre Design and its related collaboration and data-sharing server solution was primarily based on cost, according to Murray.  “Because design is not the totality of what we do, we didn’t want to spend a lot of money on the design tools.  We also do a lot of consulting on processes, which doesn’t require any solid modeling. We had a lot of experience in previous lifetimes with ProEngineer and Solid Edge. We decided on Alibre Design as a way to minimize the costs, while still fulfill all our design needs.”  By comparison, a seat of Alibre Design costs about one-fifth the amount of these competing solid modelers.

How does the solid modeling performance on Alibre Design compare to more expensive CAD packages?  “Our most expert CAD user whimpers all the time because it’s not Solid Edge, but then on the other hand, he does a very good job with it.  I think that might be more a personality thing than anything else,” jokes Murray.  Designers of all disciplines have acclimated well to the format.  Murray finds pricey engineering software too often weighed down with superfluous extras, and appreciates Alibre Design’s straightforward simplicity. 

“What I like about Alibre Design is that it is very stable, you very rarely get any hang-ups or crashes.  And I do like the fact that it’s not overloaded with features.  It has pretty sufficient features for us, without being too much.  I certainly hope Alibre continues to offer the solid basic functionality and not try to match the Pro/Es of this world, which I don’t think is the way to go.”

For the price of two or three seats of competing brands, Kaon Consulting receives a full office of powerful modelers linked through the reliable file sharing of the Alibre Team Design Server.   With the system up and running, the result is more than the sum of its parts.  The team is ready for some major undertakings – with one redesign project slated for three years of work. 

“We couldn’t  progress on our current major project without use of this system,” says Murray.  “It works very well with a small team like us.”

 
About Alibre
Alibre Inc. develops and markets Alibre Design™, the fastest growing parametric 3D solid modeling software for mechanical design and manufacturing. One-fifth the cost of comparable software, Alibre Design delivers quick ROI, ease-of-use, rich functionality and unique real-time support, and is enabling small and medium-sized businesses and workgroups to put 3D CAD on every engineer's desk, similar to utilities like Word or Excel. Alibre also delivers Alibre Design Xpress, the industry's only true 3D parametric modeler available free of charge. Alibre Design is available in sixteen languages and distributed worldwide. Founded in 1997, Alibre Inc. is privately funded and based in Richardson, Texas.  For more information and for a free trial of Alibre Design, please visit www.alibre.com.  To purchase or get more information about Alibre Team Design Server, contact Alibre sales at sales@alibre.com or call 877-525-4273.

About KAON Consulting