After recommendations by their customer, Phillips Plastics evaluated several software packages and found CETOL to be the most comprehensive tool that could handle all of their tolerancing challenges. Acquiring CETOL 6σ was the next logical step for Phillips Plastics to ensure they were offering the best design solutions possible for their customers.
“Our customers feel more confident that they are getting a design that will function as intended because they have the data in front of them,” said Chris Belisle., senior design engineer at Phillips Plastics. “Our customers understand that a little more time and effort spent up front can save a lot of time and money down the road in tool rework, product redesign, validation delays, and production downtime,” he added.
Their customers recognize that being thorough in the analysis phase can prevent accidental design issues that are very costly to fix after production molds are built. It wasn’t until they actually used the CETOL 6σ product that they realized that there were many past examples that would have benefited from the CETOL software to complete some of the more difficult analyses that were very cumbersome to do in a spreadsheet.
In addition to new designs, Phillips Plastics uses CETOL as a tool for existing products to identify where to focus their energy and resources to solve production problems and to enhance existing products through continuous improvement efforts.
Phillips Plastics has found the contribution and sensitivity reports to be very valuable in helping identify areas for consideration. The CETOL software will report the results in the order of highest to lowest contributor. “The contribution and sensitivity data CETOL provides is extremely valuable information,” commented Chris. “It provides information that is just not available using a spreadsheet. For Phillips Plastics, this has been a huge time saver. Many times it is not obvious where to focus on very complex designs.”
The advanced reports generated from CETOL are ideal for properly documenting their tolerance stacks and are very useful to fulfill regulatory requirements in the medical industry. At Phillips Plastics, proper documentation is a key item for a completed design package. Their customers can easily step through the CETOL report to verify changes that may have been made and understand the reasons behind the change.
Since Phillips Plastics is a multi-CAD environment, it was very important that the solution that they chose worked with multiple CAD systems—in their case, Pro/Engineer and SolidWorks. This enables them to provide advanced tolerance analysis for both sets of customers without significant investment in multiple solutions.