Since its founding in 1945, VMI has developed into an international organization with sites in a number of countries across the world, including the United States, Brazil, China, and Germany. The company employs a total of 800 people worldwide, with around 450 of them based in the Netherlands. In addition to car and truck tire machinery, VMI also has a division that produces machinery for washing drinks cans, and a division that manufactures machinery for producing non-woven pads.

The company's machines are sold to businesses all over the world. A typical tire machine comprises more than 100,000 components and is usually too large to ship as a single, preassembled unit. Instead, machines are dispatched to customers in multiple containers, then reassembled and commissioned at the customer on reaching their destination. Once in operation, a machine is capable of producing one car tire every 36 seconds, or one truck tire every two minutes, and the latest generation of machines operates "hands off, eyes off" — production is fully automated and takes place without any human involvement.

"In 2006, the VMI engineering department switched to SolidWorks," explains Victor de Heij, supply manager and 3D CAD expert at VMI. "Prior to this point we were using MicroStation to create 2D working drawings. MicroStation is not a particularly common tool in the engineering sector and, aside from the functional limitations of the program and the fact that we wanted to start designing in 3D, one of our main problems was finding engineers who knew how to use MicroStation. To help us select a new 3D CAD program, we conducted a benchmark analysis on four different systems. We selected SolidWorks because of the versatility of the program and the support provided by CADMES, which gave us confidence in the solution. With the new program, it is much easier for us to recruit good engineers, and we're spending less time on getting new staff up to speed with our processes."

The switch to SolidWorks has also significantly improved quality in the engineering department at VMI, as Edwin Tinnevelt, vice president of Order Engineering, explains: "The new solution doesn't mean that we're now spending less time on engineering. The main advantage we have seen is that our error rates have reduced significantly — we are getting it right the first time. SolidWorks enables engineers to develop a much deeper understanding of the design, which helps to prevent mistakes. For us, the greatest challenge in working with SolidWorks is due to the scale of our machinery — around 100,000 components are involved in the assembly of a complete machine, so you have to know how to approach this kind of task. SolidWorks features a variety of options for working with large assemblies, allowing us to reduce the number of components shown on the screen at any one time to approximately 1000. Engineers often want to be able to see each and every detail in the model, but we need to consider what you absolutely must be able to see at a given point in the design process."

C A S E S T U D Y

VMI GROUPProduction machinery for car and truck tires

Challenge:Streamline the product development process to reduce the time to produce customer-specific, tailored machinery.

Solution:Use SolidWorks design software to design modules and complete machines and SolidWorks Composer to produce manuals.

Results:• Increase percentage of "right the first time"• Higher quality products• Manuals produced within shorter timeframes

and at lower cost

VMI is a global player and the world's leading supplier in the market for car tire production machinery.   A handful of the major tire manufacturers opt to make their own production systems. In the remainder of the market—the companies that buy third-party solutions—VMI has a market share of around 70%.

Building Blocks

"All tire manufacturers have specific requirements for their production machinery," says Victor de Heij. "In this market, just offering a few standard machines is not an option. Previously, we would start the development process from scratch for each new order that came in, but that way of working is not sustainable in the long term, as it becomes a stumbling block and limits growth. So we embarked on an ambitious project, aiming to divide up the machine functions into separate, interchangeable modules, or building blocks. This involved translating the requirements and demands of our customers into functions, and then creating a module for each of these functions. We precisely defined the interface between each building block and the rest of the machine so that the various modules would be interchangeable. Thanks to the SolidWorks design software, combined with our PDM system, we were able to maintain a full overview of the approximately 200 building blocks that we developed.

"We are now in a position to produce a machine that is still fully tailored to the requirements and demands of the customer, but requires significantly less engineering work on our part — simply by selecting the right building blocks. This standardization project also reduced production hours, which in turn significantly lowered our costs and improved the quality of our products. At the start of the project, we were aiming for a situation where we could complete 80% of an order based on building blocks, with the remaining 20% engineered separately — but in 2010 and 2011, we actually managed to achieve a figure of 90%."

Training

"If engineers all create their models and deal with external relations in their own individual ways, the situation quickly becomes unworkable. Engineers all have to work with their colleague's models, and familiarization with the various methodologies used can waste a great deal of time. For this reason, strict guidelines are crucial in the engineering phase. Every engineer joining VMI starts their career with us with an internal training course lasting two to three weeks." Tinnevelt continues: "We have noticed that graduates who have just completed their studies often lack particular skills in SolidWorks. Most of them are adept at modeling, but they are often unable to produce technical drawings to an adequate standard. We outsource a lot of our production work, and although we often provide our suppliers with a STEP file for the part, the technical drawing is still their main source of information. This drawing represents our company to our external partners, so it must be of high quality and  produced in a consistent way." To ensure that the company's new recruits are able to meet its requirements for technical drawings, VMI recently partnered with Windesheim University of Applied Sciences to offer a group of 30 mechanical engineering students the chance to study for one of their minor modules with VMI. These students work on projects at VMI for eight weeks as part of the scheme.

SolidWorks Composer

VMI uses SolidWorks Composer to produce its manuals and tutorials — allowing the company to start producing manuals at an earlier stage in the process, during the design phase. The quality of the tutorials has also improved significantly, as the new program makes it easier to create illustrations and keep them up to date. An additional advantage of SolidWorks Composer is that it allows much of the text to be reused. As VMI is active in markets across the world, tutorials are translated into multiple languages, and reusing text enables the company to reduce its translation costs and keep the throughput time for each manual to a minimum.

SolidWorks and eDrawings are registered trademarks of Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corp. All other product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. ©2013 Dassault Systèmes. All rights reserved. MKVMIENG0813

"For VMI, the deVelopMent oF SolIdWorkS electrIcal IS the MoSt IMportant SolIdWorkS InnoVatIon. each oF our MachIneS IS baSed on a coMbInatIon oF MechanIcal and electrotechnIcal coMponentS. that coMbInatIon IS exactly What SolIdWorkS electrIcal IS deSIgned to do: to FacIlItate InteractIon betWeen theSe tWo dIScIplIneS."Tinnevelt,

Vice President of Order Engineering

Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corporation175 Wyman Street Waltham, MA 02451 USAPhone: 1-800-693-9000Outside the US: +1-781-810-5011Email: generalinfo@solidworks.comwww.solidworks.com

VMI Holland BV Head OfficeGelriaweg 168161 RK EpeThe Netherlands Email: mgt@vmi-group.com www.vmi-group.com VAR: CADMES B.V

"When designing in 3D rather than in 2D, it is even more important that all engineers work in the same way and apply the same structured methodology to create their models — and achieving that in an engineering team of 60 people, all working on highly complex products, is a great challenge," says de Heij.