Harbec Plastics

The Challenge

Harbec Plastics is a custom injection molder with customers across a diverse range of industries, including consumer, medical, and automotive products. Our company constantly faces shrinking lead-times and reduced pricing. These pressures forced us to re-evaluate our CAD software based on the ability to read our customer's files and make engineering changes quickly and effectively, without error. We are also striving to become a paperless company, and we needed a solution that would support that objective. We had used CADKEY in the past.

The Solution

Before choosing SolidWorks CAD software, we evaluated a variety of software, including Solid Edge and Pro/ENGINEER. SolidWorks allowed us to work in a solids environment and provided us with the best file translations. This capability allows us to pass complete and error-free surface files on to our tool room, which transfers the files into Mastercam. The most important feature of SolidWorks for us is the full associativity between files. This allows us to rapidly update our tool geometry when an engineering change is made. Since we've started using SolidWorks CAD software, our engineering department has reduced its tool design times by approximately 35%, and this number is steadily increasing as we become more and more familiar with Solidworks. SolidWorks provides us with all of these advantages and allows us to give our customers a reduced lead-time and a higher quality product.