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Most new projects Tessy acquires are first-time molded
products. Joe Raffa, VP and General Manager in charge
of sales, says, "With SIGMASOFT onboard, we are
able to commit to jobs. I know that when the customer
poses new projects to us, I can go to engineering
and talk about warp analysis or filling analysis and
whether or not a project is even feasible. Once getting
that confirmation after running the process virtually, I
have the confidence to commit to a project, knowing
that the information we received from the simulated
run will reflect reality at least 98% of the time."
Raffa tells of one situation in which the customer
wanted to take new components and marry them
to old components for a different look in the end
product. Tessy used simulation to investigate the
process, and realized the new design would not
work. The customer requested a stress and distortion
analysis from an engineering company, costing them
thousands of dollars, in addition to taking considerable
time. Although the engineering company did provide
some results and recommendations, the evidence to
support these recommendations was not provided.
This became the first large project on which Tessy
used SIGMASOFT. By simulating multiple processes
and cooling times, it was clearly seen at certain
points through the process what the issue was. Eric
Frearson, Vice President of Engineering, said, "It
gave us evidence to show the customer that no
amount of cooling changes or process changes had
any effect on the problem. It was purely a design change that was needed to fix the problem. The repots provided by the software gave us the credibility
and the client the reasurance to make the changes."
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Raffa added, “It essentially short cut the entire process;
we didn’t try running DOEs of all different configurations
or measuring a ton more parts to chase something that
was really not the solution.” Matt Learo, Sales Manager,
added, "What's reassuring about this situation was that
we hadn’t used SIGMASOFT for very long at this point
and the customer was willing to pay for the stress and
distortion analysis from the engineering company and
see how the results compared. We found the results
long before the engineering company did. When we
did receive their findings, they were the same. The
difference was, we were able to show why it happened
and already had a solution to present our customer."
"We had an existing customer where the materials
they were using were discontinued," Learo said.
"The customer called and asked that their new
material and new tool be run through SIGMASOFT
specifically, to see how the new material was going
to behave." Stafford Frearson, Project Engineer
expands, "The more complicated a project is and
the more complex a configuration might be, when
we are not sure how it might warp or how it might fill,
there's no question we feel more confident in going to
the customer and saying, 'this is what you are going
to see', when we have the report backing us up."
"We use other simulation software, but when the part
is complex and on our harder jobs, we always run
them through SIGMASOFT," Eric Frearson added.
"We have some very complex parts that we
manufacture as well as complex molds. Acquiring
SIGMASOFT to virtually run the entire mold and
process before using production time changed the
way we do business. This enables us to understand
and find solutions to significant problems that, in some
cases, we had been working on for a long time. We
are now pointed in the right direction and shown the
precise areas we need to focus on to create a solution,
thanks to this process optimization software package."
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