DELMIA Solutions Help Sumitomo Wiring Systems Slash Product Development Time by 67 %

Company’s Virtual Visual Assembly System Cuts Product Development Cycles, Improves Internal Collaboration

Yokohama, Japan - February 13, 2003 - Delmia Corp., a Dassault Systèmes company (Nasdaq: DASTY; Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA), today announced that Sumitomo Wiring Systems Ltd. (SWS), a leading wire harness manufacturer, has reduced product development cycles by using DELMIA’s ENVISION® and QUEST® solutions to simulate the manual assembly of its products. By implementing Delmia Corp.’s digital manufacturing solutions and increasing collaboration with car manufacturers, SWS has decreased its overall development time by 67 percent.

In 1998, SWS launched its virtual Visual Assembling System (VAS), with DELMIA’s ENVISION and QUEST at the core of the system, to facilitate concurrent engineering among design, production engineering, and manufacturing divisions. A car’s wire harness consists of approximately 4,000 parts. The assembly process is done manually and is difficult to optimize. In the past, SWS used a physical mock-up methodology to define, validate, and optimize the assembly process. However, due to time and cost constraints, it was difficult to cover the entire production operation and integrate all design and production change requirements.

Today, the Virtual Assembly System at SWS helps the company condense development cycles, detect early assembly problems during development, and accelerate production ramp-up times. VAS also conducts many virtual iterations of the company’s wire harness development, including design, assembly, and production flow. The SWS production engineering department utilizes ENVISION to check interferences between jigs and wires, validate wire harness assembly layouts while considering operators’ workability, and check twists and lengths of wires where harnesses are built into vehicles. Moreover, with QUEST, SWS optimizes line development by modeling the layout of the entire factory and virtually simulating the production flow before the factory is built.

"Through several development projects using VAS, we clearly see the effectiveness of Delmia Corp.’s digital manufacturing solutions,” said Koichi Sakakura, project leader for VAS Development Group in SWS’s production, engineering, and development department. “SWS intends to expand its concurrent engineering efforts by heavily using 3D data and strengthening collaboration between the design and production departments. Moreover, this system enables employees to share and utilize knowledge more efficiently, and reinforces our strong relationships with car manufacturers."

“The successful deployment of DELMIA ENVISION and QUEST at SWS is a meaningful case study,” said Bertrand Saint-Martin, president of Delmia Japan, Ltd. “Since wire harnesses at SWS are assembled manually, this process was not simulated with digital manufacturing tools. This success story proves that DELMIA’s solutions can now address a wider range of processes, enabling our customers to further decrease development cycles.”