ACUTRONIC

The Challenge

ACUTRONIC was founded in 1973 and quickly established itself as one of the world's leading manufacturers of motion simulators. Their plants develop and calibrate motion sensors and inertial navigation devices and combine high precision with very high accelerations and speeds. Although the simulators are always customized designs, their main unit is based on a number of basic models. So the search for existing assemblies is one of the most important functions a product data management solution has to fulfill at ACUTRONIC.

The Solution

In 2004, the company replaced their AutoCAD® system with SolidWorks® 3D software. Initially they used SolidWorks Workgroup PDM for data management. With an increasing number of parts in the PDM system, searches in the Workgroup version were slowing down due to the file-based approach. In 2008, the company transitioned to the SolidWorks Enterprise PDM database-driven version and saw immediate gains in speed. With the introduction of SolidWorks Enterprise PDM, ACUTRONIC was able to create strict version management to prevent the team from working with outdated versions of parts. Each model has personal property rights, which allows only one designer to load the right parts.