Weldon Technologies, Inc.

(1)

Weldon Technologies, Inc.

Weldon Technologies, Inc. manufactures lighting and electrical control systems for specialty vehicles such as ambulances, fire trucks, and school buses. The company’s primary business has evolved over the last 30 years. Initially a school bus lighting manufacturer, Weldon’s warning lamps became the basis for standardized ambulance warning lamp systems, and the company has grown since then to become an innovative electronics supplier.

Faced with increasing competition and industry consolidation, Weldon needed to streamline its design process and deliver breakthrough products more rapidly without sacrificing quality or reliability, explains Weldon Vice President of Sales and Marketing Scott Weishaar. “It’s a tradition-bound industry. We need to be able to demonstrate that our new products are substantially better than what the customer already has,” Weishaar says.

Solidifying technical leadership

To solidify Weldon’s technical leadership position in the specialty vehicle lighting market, the design team needed a better way to design configurable optical and electrical systems, using optics (index of refraction) as the driving design variable, while maintaining compatibility with legacy data. Weldon engineers believed a parametric 3D CAD system could help them achieve those goals.

But according to Sean Tillinghast, Weldon Vice President of Engineering, the company’s search for a useful, practical 3D parametric CAD system presented challenges. Weldon engineers initially evaluated several different 3D CAD modelers for parametric optical design (using the desired angle of light to design optical components) before making a selection.

“Parametric modeling should be intuitive,” Tillinghast explains. “SolidWorks^®3D modeling software has to be the easiest software I’ve ever used. With SolidWorks, I typically just anticipate where some functionality should be or how it should be used, and it works just like I imagined.”

Weldon evaluated and purchased SolidWorks software for its designers. Because of SolidWorks software’s short learning curve, extensive data translators, and intuitive, Windows^®-compliant interface, Weldon designers were well into parametric optical design after only two weeks.

Return on Investment (ROI):

One-year ROI – $99,966 Three-year ROI – $173,868

D E L I V E R I N G C O N F I G U R A B L E W A R N I N G L I G H T S W I T H S O L I D W O R K S

c a s e s t u d y

➜ Cut design cycle by 25-50 percent

➜ Reduced the number of design errors

➜ Developed configurable product family from single design

➜ Improved design communication with customers

Weldon Technologies leveraged configurations in SolidWorks to develop a new family of designer warning lights from a single design.

An innovation-driven manufacturer of illuminating devices and electrical control systems for specialty vehicles, Weldon Technologies, Inc. has provided lighting and related components to equipment manufacturers focused on the ambulance, fire truck, and school bus markets since the company was founded in 1964. Based in Columbus, Ohio, Weldon has expanded the scope of its operations to solidify its leadership position in specialty lighting and grow its business. Weldon’s 7000 Series school bus flasher is an industry standard, and the company is driving a revolution in emergency vehicle lighting with a new set of configurable designer products.

(2)

Weldon Technologies, Inc., a leading manufacturer of illuminating devices and electrical control systems for specialty vehicles, recognized the need to streamline its design process to solidify its technical leadership position in the specialty lighting market.

Specifically, the company needed to deploy parametric optical design and assembly configurations to introduce a new set of customized warning light products.

Weldon chose SolidWorks 3D modeling software because of its superior ease-of-use, PC platform, and powerful parametric design capabilities. By deploying SolidWorks, the company cut its design cycle by 25-50 percent, reduced the number of design errors, developed a configurable product family from a single design, and improved design communication with customers, all of which are helping Weldon solidify its leadership position in the specialty vehicle lighting market.

Weldon Technologies, Inc.

3656 Paragon Drive Columbus, OH 43228 Phone: 614-529-7230 Fax: 614-527-3547 www.weldoninc.com Weldon Technologies offers a complete set of electronic control systems and warning light products.

Weldon’s 4600 Series (above right) meets industry demand for warning lights. It works with existing equipment but does not require additional connectors, offering clean updated styling.

Configuring a family of products

Although Weldon’s design effort immediately benefited from parametric optical design – linking sketches that define the ray tracing of the optic to the desired output angle so the optical elements could be updated automatically by simply changing values related to the required light distribution – the company soon discovered the power of SolidWorks configurations.

Although the application of lighting products is controlled by federal and state regulations, the lamp type, arrangement, and electrical connections of lights in a preassembled module can result in literally thousands of product combinations.

Weldon is able to meet the specialty requirements of its customers by offering custom product configurations. “Using configurations in SolidWorks, we can more easily address all of these combinations. It’s nice to do the modeling once and then use configurations to design and document all of the different combinations,”

Tillinghast explains.

With this capability, Weldon can quickly fill custom orders and manage a configurable family of products without the need for tedious, repetitive design tasks. “From a technical standpoint, SolidWorks is a tightly integrated package for complex modeling,”

Tillinghast says. “There’s very little we can’t do with it, and it’s a great value for the price.”

Cutting the design cycle by 25-50% and accelerating sales

With SolidWorks software, Weldon has accelerated time-to-market and broadened its product set. “Conservatively, we’ve experienced a 25 percent reduction in our design cycle,” Tillinghast points out. “But I really think it may be more in the range of 50 percent, especially when we tap additional features in SolidWorks.”

Commenting from a sales and marketing perspective, Weishaar adds, “SolidWorks lets us show our customers prototype concepts early in the product launch process, allowing us to incorporate valuable feedback into the design. The ability to show a high-quality, three-dimensional, color, shaded model that we can rotate and explode allows our sales team to effectively market the product before it’s manufactured.”

By choosing SolidWorks, Weldon not only solidified its technical leadership position through the introduction of unique, cutting-edge products, the company also enjoyed design cycle reductions and gained a valuable tool for expanding its business.

SolidWorks is a registered trademark of SolidWorks Corporation. All other company and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

SolidWorks Europe Phone: +33 4 42 15 03 85 Fax: +33 4 42 75 31 94

Email: info@solidworks-europe.com

SolidWorks Asia/Pacific Phone: +65 6866 3885 Fax: +65 6866 3838

Email: info@solidworks-ap.com SolidWorks Corporation

300 Baker Avenue, Concord, MA 01742 Phone: +1-800-693-9000

Outside the U.S.: +1-978-371-5011 Fax: +1-978-371-7303

Email: info@solidworks.com