Case Studies and Videos

The Challenge

USFilter, a Vivendi Environment company, is North America's largest water company providing comprehensive water and wastewater systems and services to commercial, industrial, municipal, and residential customers. USFilter Zimpro Products designs and builds municipal and industrial wastewater treatment systems. Its Rothschild, Wisconsin, headquarters includes an analytical laboratory and manufacturing facility. The company's equipment is assembled and installed at the project sites by outside contractors. Any errors or omissions equate to time lost for the contractors and back-charges, which ultimately cut into profits. With that in mind, Zimpro needed to eliminate opportunities for human error that come from manually counting hardware and small parts. Plus, the company needed to design more efficiently than was possible with 2D drafting.

The Solution

One of our other product lines had evaluated several 3D packages and bought Mechanical Desktop. Even after investing over a year in modeling standard parts and assemblies with it, we decided to switch. We evaluated SolidWorks CAD software and Autodesk Inventor. We chose SolidWorks CAD software for its parametric modeling and VBA programming capabilities. In addtion, there were several features SolidWorks CAD software had at the time that were not available in other packages, like assembly component patterning. SolidWorks was also more user-friendly and intuitive. Only a few days after installing the software, I had modeled our most complicated part. Within two weeks, I started developing design tables and complex assemblies. And within six months, I have transitioned an entire product line from 2D to 3D. I had no experience with 3D modeling before using SolidWorks CAD software, except for AutoCAD V14.