Look to TactonWorks to Help You Engineer-to-Order AND Save Time by Pete Wetzel
Do you have bottlenecks in your current design workflow that could be keeping you from growing your business? How long does it take to return a quote to a customer on a new design? What about getting that custom order printed and out to production?
Processing a new design could be just done in minutes with TactonWorks, a Gold Partner Solution to the SolidWorks 3D CAD tool. TactonWorks is a Design Automation solution that can help open those bottlenecks that are slowing down your ability to deliver a quality product to your customers. If your business involves Engineering-to-Order, or Configure-to-Order products then TactonWorks can help speed up the mundane tasks of minor engineering changes and give you more time to design your next innovative product. It does this by taking the product knowledge that you have and applies rules to a solution solver to produce 3D solid models that are configured correctly, all in real time.
Say your product can have many different mounting options, but with each option the design needs to change just a little bit. TactonWorks allows you to enter in the information that you have for an order and it will modify the assembly to include the correct dimensions and parts that fit your customer’s needs. If you don’t have complete sets of criteria then TactonWorks can solve the solution for a minimized value (like cost, or production lead time) and still give the best solution.
If your customers order the same product, but want it just a little different, TactonWorks can solve this need as well. You will have the ability to take a standard part and create a custom version on the fly with complete drawings; all without having to sketch a single feature! The time savings are tremendous!
Here are some other scenarios that TactonWorks can help with:
- Do you have a product that is hard to configure because it has so many available options, or options that conflict with others? Tacton Works can find the solution.
- For custom orders, do you start your design from scratch rather than spending time looking to see if you made something similar before?
- Do you ever want to try out design variants by plugging in different part measurements to see what the results would be?
- Are your products so custom that you don’t think it could be automated? With Tacton Works you can configure 80% of the design that is covered by the rules and then use SolidWorks to finish the design. We call that our 80/20 rule. 80% Tacton Works and 20% SolidWorks.
With TactonWorks all of the product knowledge that is stored in your brain is captured and applied to a design. This allows less experienced engineers the ability to create a custom configuration without having to know the years of design iterations and testing that brought your products to the point they are now. You can program in rules like, “if you want option A and C, then you can’t have option B.” You can even program a design to the point where your Sales Team can enter custom orders and the Production Department gets the new drawings automatically!
Imagine being able to do all this within an easy to use 3D CAD Tool. Imagine being able to see, in real time, exactly how a design choice you made affects the final product. TactonWorks allows you to configure or customize your product in any order you want every time you run it, and you can run it again when the customer changes their mind. Design flexibility without ever having to edit a single sketch? That is what TactonWorks can do for you. Let us demonstrate its power and ease of use to you and how TactonWorks can make your job easier and your products more attractive to your customers.
With TactonWorks you could create that quote drawing in a matter of minutes instead of days. Contact your Alignex representative or click here to ask us a question.