CALOI Slashes Product Development Costs by 50%

CALOI has been the leading manufacturer of bicycles and related equipment in South America since it was founded in 1898 by Luigi Caloi. The Brazilian bike manufacturer has continually grown over the years and now its São Paulo and Manaus manufacturing plants produce every kind of bicycle imaginable.

CALOI strives to fulfill its mission of creating the best riding experience for every type of cyclist while leading the bicycle industry as the preferred business partner across every channel it serves. In keeping with that commitment, CALOI set out to find a finite element analysis (FEA) simulation solution in 2023 that would help the company retain its leadership position by reducing lengthy and costly prototyping cycles, which would shorten design and manufacturing operations, thereby accelerating time to market.

According to Product Engineer Leandro Timótio da Silva, CALOI sought a simulation solution to replace its long reliance on physical prototyping alone. “In the past, we spent a lot of time and money on physical tests that were carried out by a specialized company in Portugal as well as in our internal laboratories,” he explains. Because the CALOI team and Timótio da Silva are longtime users of SOLIDWORKS® CAD, so once they learned that 3DEXPERIENCE® Works simulation tools are fully compatible with SOLIDWORKS, the decision was a no-brainer. “3DEXPERIENCE Works Simulation is far ahead of its competitors,” notes Timótio da Silva. “The difference with its competitors is undeniable.”

Since implementing the 3DEXPERIENCE Works SIMULIA Structural Mechanics Engineer and associated roles, CALOI has drastically cut its development cycles for new bike frames and shortened time to market by 25 percent. The company has turbo-charged development with the MODSIM approach, which unifies modeling and simulation into a single, seamless process. “We reduced our design cycles from two months to two weeks, which frees up our team to design more in the same amount of time, enabling us to optimize our workforce,” adds Timótio da Silva.

In addition to compressing design cycles and shortening time to market, the implementation of 3DEXPERIENCE Works Simulation has helped CALOI reduce development costs related to its former physical prototyping process, as well as reducing scrap, hardware, and rework costs. “By adopting the [3DEXPERIENCE Works] solutions, we have reduced the cost and time of our prototyping process by at least 50 percent,” Timótio da Silva stresses.

The development team has not stopped conducting physical tests, but now performs them only as a final validation—a huge change for a company that in the past conducted 100% of its tests physically. “Because we’ve completely interrogated the design with simulation, we’ve realized a 50-percent reduction in design errors, resulting in cutting scrap and rework costs in half,” Timótio da Silva enthuses. The cloud-based 3DEXPERIENCE platform also enables the company to avoid costly hardware investments or other IT infrastructure costs because the simulations can be run in the cloud.

An additional advantage of using 3DEXPERIENCE Works tools is its close integration with SOLIDWORKS. “We have our own library of SOLIDWORKS designs,” explains Timótio da Silva. “We are able to reuse these designs on countless projects, which saves additional time and money. We are challenged to develop efficient and attractive bikes, which is another reason that integration between SOLIDWORKS and 3DEXPERIENCE Works is vitally important.”

CALOI’s on-boarding of 3DEXPERIENCE Works portfolio of solutions with its existing SOLIDWORKS installation has transformed the company’s product development process. By leveraging advanced simulation tools and the cloud-based 3DEXPERIENCE platform, CALOI has significantly reduced development costs, accelerated time to market, and enhanced design accuracy. The transition from lengthy physical prototyping to virtual testing has not only reduced errors and rework by 50 percent but has also freed up valuable resources for innovation.