Conveyor Pulleys Australia Improves Productivity in 3D Modelling, Quoting & Ordering by at least 50%.
When CPA moved their designs from AutoCAD to Inventor, it’s fair to say they increased productivity by around 50%, but by automating with Inventor using its iLogic module, they reduced engineering design, quoting and ordering processes by at least another 50% and what used to take two people to do, now takes one.
It only took a week for Tim Cleine, Head of Engineering and iLogic Contractor, David Gemmell to automate pulley designs which consists up to 32 part variations in an 8 part assembly using MS Excel. Over time, he has automated more and more processes.
Now, sales fill out configuration in a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet will calculate pricing and provide a quote. If the client wants to order the configuration, that same spreadsheet will drive Inventor to generate a 3D model and shop drawings based on the configuration and then write to that spreadsheet, populating a Bill of Materials, QA Documentation, Project Documentation and other necessary forms for manufacturing.
What’s more beneficial than reducing the time it takes to do manual tasks by automating them, it leads to a reduction in human error too because the tasks are automated and iLogic uses filters that avoids mistakes.
Other benefits of iLogic is that now that your work is automated, you can concentrate on other tasks, like optimising designs to increase profitability, innovation on new product lines, etc.
The development never stops and Tim is working on automating a fully operational conveyor system, automate data entry in their ERP system from the data produced from Inventor and Excel and use Inventor Professionals Dynamic Simulation to analyse motion to further optimise and automate processes.
So What is iLogic?
iLogic is integrated, inside Autodesk Inventor and Inventor Professional that allows you to automate tasks or drive models by running rule driven commands and/or triggers, programming scripts (with integrated VB.NET) and/or linking with excel spreadsheets and databases. There really is no limitation to what you can automate or drive in and outside of Inventor using Inventors iLogic module.
What Can iLogic Do?
It’s powerful and can pretty much do anything you throw at it and easy enough for anyone to use. If you know how to use Inventor, you can learn and start using iLogic
Common tasks that are done with iLogic are:
- Automatically drive a 3D model, 2D Drawings & Bill of Materials
- Automatically publish files (i.e. STEP, DWF, PDF, etc.)
- 3D Web Configurator & Quoting
- Design Standard Prompts (i.e. after saving, it will prompt you to enter in a part number if you have forgotten)
- Sales Quotes & Invoices
- QA Documentation
- Inventor Forms & Global Forms
- Triggers
- Message Boxes & Prompts
- Any additional document that can be produced from metadata in iproperties
- Add additional functionality to Inventor
- Search for iPart or iAssembly Configurations
- Read & Write Excel Spreadsheet documents
- Read & Write to HTML files, Text files, Word Documents and other file formats
- Communicate with other Windows applications
- Launch external applications and existing VBA macros
- Connect to external database applications such as MS Access or SQL server
- Use Inventor API functions directly
If you want to learn more on how you can not only transform your engineering but the way you do business using Autodesk Inventor, feel free to email me at [email protected], call me +61 3 9210 4428 or Skype damien.jovica
