CASE STUDY - Industrial Equipment
Company: Hexagon Metrology Nordic AB 
Industry: Metrology / Industrial Measurement Tools
Location: Sweden
Company Background:
Hexagon Metrology is part of the Hexagon-group, and markets several leading metrology brands for industrial measuring. These brands represent a globally installed base of millions of coordinate measuring machines, portable measuring systems and hand tools, along with tens of thousands of software licenses within metrology.
The Challenge:
In order to offer their customers industry leading metrology equipment, the engineers at Hexagon needed a 3D design system that offered performance, flexibility and full collaboration. With their current packages, AutoCAD and Solidworks, Hexagon felt these needs were not being meet. Due to this, they felt they needed to investigate other design options thereby allowing Hexagon to design and offer the best products possible to their customers.
The IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite:
After testing the IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite (DCS), specifically IRONCAD, the DCS’s premier 3D design application, Hexagon’s engineers saw that the needs for performance, flexibility and collaboration would be met. Due to IRONCAD’s “Innovative Design” technology, Hexagon’s engineers were free from the limitations of traditional 3D modelers such as always having to work with constraints and parametric relationships. Innovative Design means you don’t work with constraint and parametric relationship unless you want to.
Click here to learn more about IRONCAD’s Innovative Design.
Another factor was IRONCAD’s ability to work with multiple parts and assemblies within one single file, making data management much simpler. In traditional 3D systems each part is a single file on your hard drive or network. When creating large assemblies, you are literally managing thousands of files which is time consuming and very prone to errors. With IRONCAD, you can have as many parts and assemblies as you want inside one file. It’s entirely up to the engineer has how they chose to store their data. IRONCAD also uses catalogs to help you quickly and easily design, adding items to and from a catalog is as simple as a drag & drop maneuver and these catalogs can be shared across the network with other DCS users.
Finally there was the issue of working with the volumes of legacy 2D data Hexagon had accumulated over the years. IRONCAD DRAFT, one of the applications in the DCS helped address this by offering a fully compatible DWG editing tool with a very similar interface to AutoCAD making the transition to the DCS almost seamless.
Summary:
- 75% productivity increase over Solidworks.
- No longer being limited by constraints and parametric relationships.
- A single scene design environment and catalogs making data management much simpler.
- Full ability to work with legacy 2D data with IRONCAD DRAFT.
“We have replaced both AutoCAD and SolidWorks with IRONCAD. Many different fixtures and tools have been designed at Hexagon. When it comes to 3D-design, we do see a big advantage by using IRONCAD. Our experience has been that we design faster and easier compared to our earlier solution because we don’t need to struggle with parametric relations and constraints. With IRONCAD, we can design a whole project in a single file and we also get great usage with the catalogs by dragging and dropping parts and assemblies into new designs whenever needed.” -Patrik Kärrvall, R&D Manager, Hexagon Metrology Nordic AB
