3D CAD makes machine development faster

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Nov 23, 2007

Manufacturer upgraded to 3D CAD to accelerate and optimise product development, and 2D CAD no longer met the growing needs of the company and its market challenges.

A Costa Righi has upgraded to 3D design with CoCreate OneSpace Modeling.

The company is a leader in the construction of complete machines and plants for sawmills, woodworking companies and parquet producers.

A Costa Righi also offers services including engineering, production and customer service.

From its headquarters in Schio, Veneto, Italy, it exports 85% of its products to Europe, South America, North America, Asia, Russia and South Africa.

Although the company has just added seats of CoCreate design software, the two companies are hardly strangers.

"We've used CoCreate Software since 1990", said Enzo Veronese, Mechanical Designer at A Costa Righi.

"We started out with CoCreate OneSpace Drafting [formerly ME10], CoCreate's 2D system, with results that convinced us to continue with the company's software when we upgraded to solid modelling".

The manufacturer upgraded to 3D CAD because it wanted to accelerate and optimise product development, and 2D CAD no longer met the growing needs of the company and its market challenges.

CoCreate OneSpace Modeling, CoCreate's 3D CAD, does meet those needs.

Plus, it provides an approach to design that makes development faster, easier and more flexible compared with working with other systems.

"With the freedom offered by CoCreate's Dynamic modelling based approach", said Veronese: "we can now easily change our designs even late in product development".

With CoCreate OneSpace Modeling, designers don't have to develop and edit their models using parameters.

They work directly on their geometry.

So, any team member can edit a model at any time and very quickly, and doesn't have to create and maintain a recipe of parametric design features that produce that geometry.

With this innovative approach, you can also edit models imported from other 3D CAD systems as if they were native to OneSpace Modeling.

Along with its current seats of OneSpace Drafting and OneSpace Modeling, A Costa Righi has also added CoCreate OneSpace Model Manager for the integrated management of design information.

Veronese said that the transition to the new environment could have been complicated for a number of reasons.

"Our company was based on Unix and we had 15+ years of archives and customisations that we didn't want to lose".

With the support of CoCreate, the company smoothly transitioned to a Windows environment - allowing A Costa Righi to integrate its product development with popular office and business applications.

"We did a pilot installation to test and migrate our customisations", said Veronese.

"The evolution to 3D and Windows succeeded".

"We are more effective in our current work and have preserved our legacy 2D designs - a valuable and vital asset for our company".

CoCreate partner CDM Isigraf supports A Costa Righi's design software environment and helped the company choose and deploy the best 3D solution and addons for its needs.