Business Challenge Identified

Energy conservation, safety and noise reduction.  These are key functions of removable Thermal and Acoustic insulation blankets.  They're also major components in enabling companies to meet the demands of government regulations and to manage operating costs in today’s rapidly evolving oil and gas, shipping and material processing industries.

When designing and producing insulation covers many organization struggle with several common fabrication issues including:

• Slow, expensive manual design and fabrication processes

• Multiple site visits to achieve the right fit

• Less than optimal material utilization and excessive costs

• Incomplete production history which forces them to re-create everything for reorders

Problem Solved with Digital Patterning

Ohio Valley Industrial Services manufactures custom designed removable insulation covers for Industrial, Research, and Power Generation customers.  Their customers value their industry and product knowledge as well as the high quality of their manufactured products.

While the company has always been profitable, their leadership team felt that their ability to expand the business and grow revenues was being limited by manual processes.  When they met with the experts at ExactFlat they were focused on utilizing digital patterning to address a few key challenges:

1. Avoid the endless number of iterations used to manually create a form fitting jacket

2. Design covers that contour perfectly around tight-fitting joints on the equipment

3. Accurately measure the placement of attachment points, grommets and fasteners

4. Enable quick and cost-effective response to retrofit jobs or short run reorder requests

During the evaluation process they were able to define several automation advantages that helped more than justify their investment in digital patterning. 

Reduce Design Time: By starting their work from a 3D CAD file, they eliminated the need to visit the customer site for measurements. This expanded their market from local clients to global access and reduced the associated risks.

Streamline conversion from 3D design to 2D patterns: By integrating their flattening workflow inside SOLIDWORKS, the time spent on making physical prototypes for fit testing and updating pattern documents was reduced from sveral days to just a few hours.

Optimize Material Utilization: By eliminating physical prototypes, improving design flexibility and incorporating automated nesting, the improved material yield further reduced costs and increased competitiveness.

Competitive Advantage and Profits Increased

With their legacy process, Ohio Valley spent the majority of the time capturing measurements, creating test blankets and then painstakingly iterating until the job was done.  Now all they need is a 3D CAD file and they can turn-around a complete project, sometimes within the same day if necessary.   

This used to take the team (and still takes their competitors) weeks.  They now have a predictable process for product delivery and costs estimation.  As a result, they have the added confidence needed to go after projects anywhere in the world knowing that they can deliver faster and better than their competitors.

"ExactFlat helped us reduced our costs and time-to-market by 60%. Within 60 days of implementing, we were winning more business by delivering faster .  We also saw increased profitability on every project."

 - Joel Kaminski, Vice President, Ohio Valley Industrial Services

Need help to determine if ExactFlat Digital Patterning software is the right solution from your business?  Just click on the link below and schedule a time to meet with the experts.