Founded in 1998 in the city of Lima, Peru, by Stu Blattner, TUMI has more than 20 years of drilling experience and more than 100,000 meters drilled. They currently have machines distributed across the globe in countries such as Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, the United States, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico and South Africa. Their strategic alliance with Stu Blattner Inc. allows them to be very competitive globally in the raise boring industry.
Before deciding to implement SOLIDWORKS® as a platform for developing 3D designs, TUMI used 2D tools such as AutoCAD® in the project development stage and created 3D designs only for special cases and for some secondary purposes, such as interference detection, creation of 2D views and rendering.
TUMI engineering continuously strives to improve the quality of its products and the efficiency of its processes. However, creating projects only in 2D using a limited tool like AutoCAD made it very difficult to reach their goals. On top of this, they constantly struggled with delayed design cycles, unreliable bills of materials, high rework rates, design revisions, difficulty understanding 2D documents in the manufacturing stage, assembly problems and more.
To eliminate all these limitations, continuously improve the quality of its projects and be more competitive in its market, TUMI decided to implement SOLIDWORKS for project development. They got immediate results, reducing the design cycle by 40 percent on the first project completed using SOLIDWORKS.
According to Project Engineer Jorge Arizaca, using SOLIDWORKS allowed them to make quick decisions and meet TUMI’s work standards, including in the production group. For this reason, TUMI sees SOLIDWORKS as a strategic business partner that
it can rely on to achieve world excellence and to continue developing innovative projects that meet the requirements of its customers.
FASTER TIME TO MARKET
In the past, projects like the SBM 300 and SBM 700 SR drilling rigs took 10 months to complete. With SOLIDWORKS, the current project took only six months. In addition to all the benefits it gained with the significant 40 percent reduction in the project cycle, today TUMI is able to create more innovative products and reach the market much faster, making them even more competitive and successful in their business.“
The implementation of SOLIDWORKS was the solution to take up the challenge of making improvements to the SBM 300-090 machine design and designing the SBM 700 SR-088 self-propelled machine. In 14 months, we were able to design, manufacture and deliver these machines to our customers. We have changed the design processes and procedures of our drilling machines. Thanks to the SOLIDWORKS environment, several people worked on both projects simultaneously and we were able to validate the final projects in a short time,” explains Arizaca.