Centurion Systems manufactures a range of award-winning products to control the access of people and vehicles into and out of residential, commercial, and industrial properties.Headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa, the company develops gate automation and access control products that maximize customer security and convenience, and currently exports products to more than 70 countries. With hundreds of thousands of systems installed worldwide, Centurion has earned a reputation for reliable, innovative products that meet he needs of the gate and access automation industry.
From its founding in 1986, Centurion has grown dramatically, partly because of its ongoing investments in research, technology, and development. These investments include a commitment to using the latest CAD tools to continually explore innovative concepts, upgrade existing products, and develop tooling. Thus, Centurion was an early adopter of 3D design when the company migrated from the AutoCAD® 2D design tools to the SOLIDWORKS 3D product development platform almost two decades ago, according to R&D MechanicalManager Michael Blackman.
“Prior to 1998, there was only one mechanical designer working for Centurion Systems, and he had experience usingAutoCAD,” Blackman explains. “The company hired a second designer who was more familiar with SOLIDWORKS. This was obviously a bit of a dilemma for the company, so a directive was put into place for both products to be evaluated and a single platform to be chosen. As it turns out, the AutoCAD designer eventually moved on; and in 1998, SOLIDWORKS became the platform that Centurion chose to adopt going forward.”
Centurion chose to standardize on the SOLIDWORKS 3D product development system because it is easy to use and provides access to a complete range of additional integrated design and engineering solutions. Since implementing SOLIDWORKS 1998,Centurion has added more licenses to support its 10 designers.Over the years, Centurion has added SOLIDWORKS Premium,SOLIDWORKS Plastics Professional, SOLIDWORKS VisualizeProfessional, SOLIDWORKS Composer, and SOLIDWORKS PDMProfessional software solutions.
“Being able to design, optimize, simulate, visualize, document, and create tooling in a single environment significantly shortens time to market,” Blackman stresses. “SOLIDWORKS is developing a great ecosystem with their products that allow us as designers to deliver products faster.”
BRINGING PRODUCTS TO MARKET FASTER
Since implementing SOLIDWORKS, Centurion has accelerated product time-to-market—developing new products in a third of the time—allowing the company to innovate and expand its product offering. Blackman attributes this improved productivity to shorter design cycles (which take a half to a third of the time), greater design reuse (which saves 50 to 75 percent of design time), and faster development of manufacturing tooling(which facilitates on-site production).
“Designs used to take a long time,” Blackman explains.“We are probably down to a third of the time. This could be due to having had smaller teams in the past, but our productivity improvements are definitely impacted by the various SOLIDWORKS packages that we use. We are now ina position where the mechanical design aspect of a project is considerably less than the administrative and tooling tasks required. I believe that this has a lot to do with the enhanced capabilities of SOLIDWORKS.
“Utilizing the various tools within SOLIDWORKS, we can design and test solutions quickly and ultimately send out the various files, in various formats, for prototyping. This allows us to quickly determine if an idea is feasible within the CAD environment, but to also be able to prototype and test real working samples. Without these tools, we believe that it could easily take two to three times longer.”
SAVING TIME, ENSURING RELIABILITY WITH SIMULATION
Using SOLIDWORKS Premium simulation, Centurion saves time during product development while simultaneously optimizing designs to ensure product reliability. “SOLIDWORKS improves our productivity by enabling our designers to get a very good understanding of their designs within the CAD system,”Blackman notes.
“They are able to model concepts, test the physics of their designs, check component interfaces, test for strength through simulation, conceptualize different options, and optimize and simplify design ideas, all before a prototype is manufactured,”Blackman says. “This means that design iterations are minimized and project delivery is improved. The simulation tools allow us to test ideas during the development stages of the design long before we have to invest in prototypes and expensive tooling.”