Kalmar Industries chooses Catia V5 for heavy equipment.

World’s leading supplier of mobile equipment adopts the flagship solution of Dassault Systèmes and IBM,CATIA, with the support of Semcon IT solutions

 

Stockholm, Sweden and Paris, France, 27 September 2001.  Kalmar Industries, along with IBM and Dassault Systemes today announced that Kalmar Industries, a part of the Partek group, has acquired forty CATIA V5 installed workstations.  Mats Karlsson, Project Manager, Kalmar Industries, said “ It is too early to be able to say how important the efficiency and financial gains will be, but we know that we will save money, become more effective and reach the market faster with CATIA V5.”  

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In the spring 2000, Kalmar Industries decided to migrate from 2D design computer-aided 3D design. An extensive evaluation process was carried out involving CATIA V5 and four other competing CAD systems.  Each solution was tested by designers based on the ease and accuracy of creating a steering axle design. This method provided the production team with comparable underlying material with which to evaluate the competing applications.  CATIA V5 was judged as being the most modern system, doted with a modern and user-friendly interface, and to be the system best adapted to the group’s potential growth and evolution.<br/>

 

 

Kalmar also believed that Semcon, as implementation partner, would be able to provide considerable value through its understanding of both Kalmar's way of working and of CATIA. The decision was thus taken to implement CATIA V5 as Kalmar group's common CAD system. Today, with a total of forty CATIA V5 work-stations installed, Kalmar Industries' expectations have been realized several times over.  "It creates greater efficiency within the whole group because we now have a common platform", says Mats Karlsson, who is project manager at Kalmar Industries. "Some of our installations had old systems, meaning that we could only work in 2D. With CATIA V5, we are able to work in 3D throughout the entire organization."

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Max Gustafsson of Semcon IT Solutions was responsible for the implementation of CATIA as well as the integration with other business systems. Pär Nobring, project manager at Semcon, says "CATIA V5 is perfectly adapted to Kalmar Industries' operations, thanks to the functionality that V5 provides. CATIA V5 supports the whole process of an engineering company, including design, computations, manufacture, information management and simulations". <br/>

 

 

 

CATIA V5 is  currently  used  at Kalmar Industries for computations, analysis  and  simulation  in the creation of new product series of various types of  fork-lift  trucks.   The initial design is conceived in 3D and then underlying production material is created in the form of drawings in both 3D and 2D.  Different modules are used, such as a base module for 3D and 2D  (MD2), collision analyses  (SPA), visibility field analyses (NAV) and sheet metal design  (SMD), movement simulation and fatigue measurement (FEM), as well as STEP for communication with subcontractors. <br/>

 

 

In addition to CATIA  enabling  the  discovery of collisions including processing  at  an early stage, there exists distinct time-savings when  working,  for  example,  with  sheet  metal  design. Another decisive element for  Kalmar  Industries  was the ability to simulate visibility  fields from a fork-lift truck driver's cab.   Different countries have different legal requirements for the content of this visibility field, which are easy to simulate with the aid of  CATIA V5’s visibility field analysis.   Several more CATIA V5 extension modules will soon be installed at Kalmar, such as electrical installation, production modules and PDM.<br/>