IBUKI Inc., a mold development and manufacturing company, introduced CADdoctor to their engineering team to check the data quality, repair, and translate 3D CAD data provided by their customers.

Time spent on repairing the CAD data for the engineers has been significantly reduced since the introduction of CADdoctor thus becoming an important tool for their efficient mold development phase.

Background and Challenges – CAD Model Repair

IBUKI Inc. is a mold development and manufacturing company with more than 80 years of experience. One of IBUKI Inc.’s strengths is the unique technology called “mold decoration” that enables to carve a detailed pattern on large mold. Their technology is highly valued by manufacturing companies all across Japan.

Since 2015, IBUKI Inc. has been proactively challenging themselves to streamline various operations with the corporate vision “Fuunji of mold industry,” which means to become the pioneer in the industry. One of their challenges is to make the mold development phase more efficient.

IBUKI Inc. uses “CADmeister,” which is a CAD software, for mold development. “IGES,” “STEP,” and “Parasolid” are the main file formats that IBUKI Inc. receives from the customers. In the past, IBUKI Inc. used to experience frequent data errors when importing those files to CADmeister.

There were many data errors related to CAD geometry such as not being able to enlarge, shrink and modify 3D models.

Mold engineers had to find each error and repair them manually one by one, giving meticulous attention not to change the original design intent. However, this approach took a great deal of time just finding the errors, and affected the production lead time.

CAD data repairing flow before the introduction of CADdoctor

CADdoctor’s Data Repair and Translation

IBUKI Inc. decided to implement Elysium’s CADdoctor to reduce the CAD data error repair time and increase their 3D CAD data quality for the purpose of improving efficiency for the entire production process.

First, the engineers checked the 3D CAD data quality provided by their customers with CADdoctor. CADdoctor automatically sets the appropriate check items for CADmeister, so the engineers do not need to manually select the appropriate check items one by one.

CAD data translation flow with CADdoctor

The detected errors can be healed automatically in CADdoctor, avoiding the haste of repairing them manually. CADdoctor is designed not to repair the errors that can change the original geometry substantially, avoiding the risk of changing the design intent. Those errors can be checked by the engineers one by one and repaired easily with interactive healing. Once all the repairs are completed, CADdoctor exports the data in CADmeister data format.

Missing faces exist when opening the original CAD data with CADmeister. (Left)
Missing faces are no longer exist after translating the CAD data with CADdoctor. (Right)

Engineers at IBUKI Inc. were able to reduce the data repair time significantly with CADdoctor. In fact, the data repair time decreased by 80% only after a month.

Effect of CADdoctor

As the CAD data repair process became more efficient after the introduction of CADdoctor, the engineers were able to focus more on design concepts and value-added processes.

Repair times for the data received from the customers were evened out regardless of the data quality, and as a result, IBUKI Inc. was able to estimate development hours much easier and create development plans more accurately.

IBUKI Inc. is planning to expand utilizing CADdoctor in the development phase and try establishing more efficient mold production processes that suit their corporate philosophy of “Fuunji of mold industry” by optimizing the features of CADdoctor such as geometry simplification.