This article is a summary of a fantastic case study published by The Fabricator.
Matot , a small Chicagan manufacturer of dumbwaiters founded in 1888 has recently moved its design and manufactuing process in to the 21st century using SolidWorks and DriveWorks to automate much of this process.
Example of dumbwaiters in an office and Lab environment
Until very recently, the shop had relied on its workers decades of experience to interpret orders as and when they received them. In order to ensure that they could cope with the thousands of variations in design the company stocked serious amounts of angle iron, sheets and many other components needed for the manufacturing of dumbwaiters.
With demand booming , the owners Anne and Cece Matot saw an oppurtunity to modernise their ageing manufacturing process. Now Solidworks and DriveWorks have become a key component to their manufacturing process, as Jon Lane acting Vice President of operations commented :
“It takes basic master models and helps us tailor them to become a unique model for a particular customer.”
DriveWorks has allowed the company to capture the knowledge that their workers had developed over the years, whilst increasing the efficiency of their design process by knowing exactly which parts are needed for each order. Now they don’t just manufacture the lifts quicker but they have also reduced the need for raw stock inventory.
Jon Lane acting Vice President of operations commented “There was some resistance at first” but with time opinions have changed and now “people are thinking in terms of the model and the geometry of the part”.
For many years fabricators such as Matot tweaked their process to fit the order, now Lane says “We design around our process , our process isn’t structured around our design “
To find out more about Matot or to find out more about DriveWorks please click the links below.