User Report on AutoForm’s Cloud Solution Powered by Rescale
During the recent past many suppliers in the automotive sheet metal stamping industry have been faced with an increased pressure from their customers to hand in their quotes within a very short period. Whenever on top of that the requests come in sporadically, it becomes a huge challenge for the departments responsible for tender preparation. Pending simulations quickly start to pile up, since the involved engineers often have only the hardware and software capacities at their fingertips, as was planned to be sufficient in times with an average workload. Besides, rarely used engineering approaches and techniques maybe cannot even be assessed and validated by simulation, since the necessary software functionalities are not included in the licenses available inside the company or department.
Fortunately, nowadays such a scenario can easily be avoided – just as WMU did!
WMU (Weser Metall Umformtechnik) is a German part supplier with nearly 500 employees, whose skills have always been deemed the key to the company’s high quality standard. That is one reason why today WMU can reckon numerous of the leading OEMs among their customer base.
Below, WMU shares how they faced up to the market challenge and chose to break new ground to be able to satisfy their customers’ needs.
Arne Jonas Bytom, a key user at WMU, reports on his experience with AutoForm in the Cloud.
“As a supplier for stampings and subassemblies, mainly for the sectors body in white and exhaust technology, we are part of a volatile industry with ever tighter timelines and ever shorter project life cycles.
Due to the expectations of customer’s procurement departments to be able to make a statement as accurate as possible about project costs within the shortest possible time, the demands on the sales department and the calculation also increase.
AutoForm proved to be the ideal software for us in the evaluation of costs and manufacturability in sheet metal forming. Within a short time it is possible to establish a meaningful process plan, to estimate material use and to calculate process costs. Tooling costs can also be estimated using Standards, which can be adapted to your own cost structures.
Since many customers request an evaluation of manufacturability already during the offer phase, only by working with AutoForm-Compensator and AutoForm-FormingSolver we are able to make valid statements in this regard. However the task of having less processing time to evaluate more parts in even higher quality either ties up a lot of capacity or requires additional cost-intensive computing power.
“With “AutoForm in the Cloud” we see ourselves in a position to offer our customers the necessary flexibility.”
Accessing AutoForm in the Cloud offers the optimal way to reduce our fixed costs without sacrificing computing power. Thus, in addition to the existing capacities for the daily business, we are able to use a powerful system, which is based on the platform and can easily take over already processed data.
Especially critical parts with high demand for “trial-and-error” simulation loops due to part change requests and simulations require high computing power exceed the average workload. Consequently, the throughput of parts that need to be processed would decrease due to missing spare capacities. This issue could be overcome with “AutoForm in the Cloud”.
Because it is possible to access the cloud regardless of location, we have increased flexibility. In the meantime, “AutoForm in the Cloud” has become an integral part of the evaluation process of stamping and forming parts at WMU, most recently due to its convincing performance and consistently high quality customer service.”
Arne Jonas Bytom
WMU – Weser Metall Umformtechnik GmbH
Learn how you can benefit from the advantages AutoForm in the Cloud compared to on-premises licensing by reaching out to our experts in your area!
