Safety Devices have been ‘Making Motor Sport Safer’ for over 25 years and is universally recognised as the leading manufacturer of roll cages. All of Safety Devices products comply with regulatory bodies such as MIRA – (A Motor Sport Industry Authority) which provides safety validation and certification.
It was clear a change was needed from Safety Devices’ existing AutoCAD system in order to optimise development of new products, as too much time and cost was being wasted in many separate discrete processes. Saftey Devices needed a new development tool that could underpin their engineering function yet provide the integration capabilities to help the whole company.
Following an evaluation of several competitive CAD design tools including Pro/ENGINEER (now PTC Creo), CATIA and AutoDESK Inventor, Safety Devices decided to implement the SOLIDWORKS Premium package. The major reasons were:
- Developed specifically for Microsoft Windows
- Powerful functionality for generating assemblies and production drawings.
- A growing industry standard for 3D product development
- Integrated analysis with SOLIDWORKS Simulation.
- Ease of use and Value for money
SOLIDWORKS Premium delivers integrated Finite Element Analysis with Simulation. This gives the ability to understand how roll cages would behave under certain loading conditions stipulated by MIRA.
“Since using SOLIDWORKS, we are able to achieve an improved “in house” understanding of the deflection in our products under regulation loading conditions using SOLIDWORKS Simulation Analysis. Whilst certification is still required, our own results compare within 5% to that of MIRA. This has given us increased levels of confidence in knowing that our cages our suitable for purpose and has dramatically reduced time and cost.
For our standard product range, we now have the ability to reduce product development times from 10 days to 5. Further more, the integrated SOLIDWORKS solution has other downstream benefits such at generation of the Bills of Materials and automatic integration with SAGE, our manufacturing system together with graphics for our new Websites. We have been able to exchange design data with our customers who are already using SOLIDWORKS and also exchange data with suppliers through eDrawings.
SOLIDWORKS has proved to be an excellent investment for our company. We have been supported extremely well by Innova Systems who have provided the very highest quality support and training for our very specific needs”.
