Sigmetrix: Producing Better Products with Mechanical Variation Management

Since in-person trade shows and interviews are not possible right now and into the foreseeable future, via Zoom we recently interviewed Ed Walsh, VP of Global Sales at Sigmetrix. During the interview, he spoke about how the company is focused on helping customers design and build better products through mechanical variation management. “We’re unique because Sigmetrix is a software company, a service company, and a training company that together provide a solutions approach for our customers,” Walsh said.

When asked for a little background on himself and Sigmetrix, Walsh said, “I’ve been with Sigmetrix for 14 years, and have been in this industry for over 20. Over that time, I’ve witnessed a need that customers are starting to convey – they want to get the most out of their technology investments with the most efficient use of their resources. This includes things like having solutions that scale to multiple skill levels in an organization. We address this need by having our cornerstone tolerance analysis tool (CETOL 6 Sigma) that is used for advanced applications because it’s very powerful, but also a 1D tool (EZtol), that’s relatively simple to use. We are seeing an increased demand for tools that teach people geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) as they use them by incorporating training solutions in all of our tools. We feel that that education helps establish a use case, or ability to be used, by that whole spectrum of users”.

“Because too much confidence is often placed in 3D models alone, we also see that customers want a tool that can be used in the multiple stages of the product development process. For example, traditionally, tolerance stack-up was done at the end of the design process just before it went into production. It was more of a validation tool, whether they were using spreadsheets or other tools”.

“If I look at the best of our customers versus the rest of our customers, just like most other simulation tools, they’ve shifted it earlier into the product development process, into the concept, and even R&D stages, to get an order of magnitude, a ‘what if’ type of analysis, on what’s better and what’s not. Our CETOL tool would be an example where people have shifted that usage. Customers also want to have decision-making from these analysis tools that can be addressed by multiple tiers of accountability in an organization”.

MCADCafe Interviews Ed Walsh, VP Global Sales, Sigmetrix

Making the Case for GD&T and Tolerance Analysis

While Sigmetrix considers itself a niche company for GD&T and tolerance analysis and mechanical variation management, it is a very important niche that goes well beyond product validation and can be applied in all phases of development, design, and inspection that can help customers make better decisions to ensure meeting their product requirements.

Mechanical variation is a reality of manufacturing and assembly processes. Companies who successfully manage this variation reap many competitive benefits. Everything has variation – designing and building to an acceptable range, and not just a point are essential and engineers increasingly understand the importance and implications of this.

Sigmetrix can help:

• Maximize the return on MBD/MBE investment
• Improve profitability by balancing product quality with manufacturing cost
• Achieve faster time to market by reducing design and prototype cycles
• Deliver more innovative products through better understanding of mechanical variation
• Capture, transfer, and retain critical product and process knowledge

Walsh continued, “One of the things that I’ve seen over the years, sometimes with other simulation tools, is an end user will show their management an analysis report. The management says, ‘Okay, well, what do we do with that?’ We are continuously working on our entire tool set to help people make these decisions, and have those decisions be very visually rich, and drive down to exactly what the root cause of the problems that need to be solved are.”

“In addition to that, they need to make sure that the domain knowledge is transferred to the end users, and not just how to use the tools. So, in addition to the domain knowledge, of course, it’s the skill set I’m using, the tools and the technology. And then finally, road maps that show the customer how to best implement these.” In other words, companies can be successful with democratization of tools, but can’t ignore education and its essential supplemental nature.

“As far as the solutions for the skill sets and domain knowledge, Sigmetrix has invested heavily in R&D, and a lot of development cost in developing computer-based training tools, for our software tools, such as CETOL. We’ll be releasing a CETOL computer-based training class, very high quality, and very engaging.”

“In addition, we offer a Level 1 GD&T class. We’ve sold hundreds and hundreds of these at this point. We also have customers looking to train almost 1000 users on this in the next six months. The computer-based training makes it very cost-effective, and it also allows us to train people all over the world. So, where we were limited before that you actually had to have somebody physically trained, or at least if you’re doing it virtually now during the time of COVID.”

With regard to customers expressing frustration with other simulation tools, Walsh said, “I was recently talking to a customer, and it was a conversation about democratization of simulation tools. But really, he was talking more so about their experience to date with, I believe, CAE tools, where end users now had tools to easily create simulation models, but they didn’t have the knowledge or experience to determine if they were being set up correctly. They don’t have the domain knowledge associated with them to know what decisions to make. They don’t necessarily know what inputs that should be going in, they don’t necessarily know if a model is set up correctly or not correctly. And they also don’t necessarily know what to do with the results, or what decisions to make, or how to report those results to their management when they get them.”

“On top of that, this same customer was saying that the management didn’t want to invest in training these users, that they thought they could go with, ‘Let’s train one subject matter expert, and then that person will be responsible for permeating that knowledge to 15, 20 people in that group.’ The problem is that one subject matter expert ends up doing all the work and just becomes a bottleneck.”

“This all goes back to where most of those end users got at least some of that experience with CAE tools in the university. With variation management, the dimensional management tolerance analysis, very little is taught  in university programs. It’s something that people have to learn as part of their career, as part of their job. This has really driven us to say that we can no longer just be a product company, we have to be a solution company.”

“We have to look at, when we address a customer, not just, ‘Hey, here’s this really cool piece of software that’s really powerful that a mid-level subject matter expert can use,’ but we have to look at everybody from the whole life cycle, from design, through manufacturing, assembly, through inspection, every skill set, and say, “What tools and pieces of knowledge can we provide to these people that’s going to allow that entire spectrum of understanding of mechanical variation management to provide the most value to the company?”

Sigmetrix Products and Beyond

Recently, Sigmetrix released a new version (10.4) of CETOL 6 Sigma, the company’s flagship product.

CETOL 6 Sigma is a 3-D model-based tolerance analysis solution that works directly with PTC Creo, CATIA, SOLIDWORKS, and Siemens NX CAD model data.

CETOL 6 Sigma is a 3D model-based tolerance analysis solution that works directly with PTC® Creo®, CATIA®, SOLIDWORKS®, and Siemens NX™ CAD model data

Tolerance analysis benefits businesses in many ways. It helps improve profitability by balancing quality with manufacturing cost. Companies can also realize faster time to market by reducing the need for additional design and prototype cycles. Finally, it allows companies to gain confidence in their product and process decisions before making costly investments.

“The cost of achieving a quality product grows exponentially as it moves from design to manufacturing and finally to customers hands,” stated Sigmetrix President, James Stoddard. “CETOL 6 Sigma gives engineers the tools to identify and resolve issues earlier in the process, helping to maximize the profitability of products for a company.”

CETOL 6 Sigma enables product development teams to easily and fully understand the often-complex impact of dimensional and assembly variation on their designs. This knowledge enables them to make adjustments before problems appear in manufacturing or, even worse, in their customers’ hands. Users of all expertise levels will appreciate the multiple levels of assistance available within the software.

CETOL 6 Sigma 10.4 provides several enhancements, including:

• Unilateral measurement requirements – When defining measurement requirements, you can specify just an upper or lower limit
• Improved report processing – Report templates now include options for specifying how the report is post processed and opened in the target application for report layout
• New command-line execution options for Creo allow for automation of starting a new CETOL analysis or working with data saved from a previous one
• Improved selection process – When adding a joint or a measurement, after selecting the first feature, that part is either hidden or changed to transparent so that the second selection is easier
• Better precision control – When entering a tolerance value, the precision automatically increases as you enter more digits, but the precision can only be decreased by specific user action
• Data management improvements for renamed assemblies – When the model data is stored in the top-level assembly and the CAD assembly has been renamed, CETOL makes it easier for the user to understand that saved data exists and map it to the newly named assembly
• Revised severities – The severities of some advisor messages have been adjusted to improve consistency between types of messages
• Naming improvements in the Analyzer – The Analyzer now includes the CAD name for assemblies, parts, and linked annotations in the appropriate columns

Sigmetrix provides a complete portfolio helping customers design and produce better products through mechanical variation management. In addition to CETOL 6 Sigma, Sigmetrix offers an array of software and training solutions that include:

EZtol, a standalone 1D tolerance stack-up analysis tool intended to replace spreadsheet-based strategies by supporting model-based stack-ups on models from most of the major CAD systems. EZtol is a 1D analysis tool designed to make it easier to create, manage and report upon multiple 1D tolerance analyses in an assembly. EZtol has also been adopted as the embedded 1D tolerance stack-up tool by PTC for inclusion in PTC Creo and by Autodesk for inclusion in Autodesk Inventor.

EZtol a standalone 1D tolerance model-based stack-up analysis tool intended to replace spreadsheet-based strategies and supports most of major CAD systems

GD&T Advisor, an interactive tool that provides expert guidance on the correct application of GD&T withing the PTC Creo environment. GD&T Advisor software authoring tool has been adopted by PTC for inclusion in PTC Creo and by Autodesk for inclusion in Autodesk Inventor.

Training on a variety of topics including GD&T, tolerance analysis, dimensional management, and MBD / MBE. Courses covering the basics of tolerance analysis as well as how to use the software tools.

GD&T / GPS Education and software tools focused on specifying tolerances using Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T) as defined by ASME or Geometric Product Specification (GPS) as defined by ISO. Over a dozen instructor-led and computer-based courses covering basic to advanced GD&T/GPS, MBE, and MBD.

Consulting and implementation services supplement the broad range of Sigmetrix software and training solutions to help customers understand how variation impacts their designs and how best to document the functional limits of variation using the best language available today – GD&T/GPS.  We have an experienced team from a diverse industry background has helped hundreds of companies produce better products.

These products and services enable companies to better understand the impact of manufacturing variations on their designs, facilitating the ability to make more objective cost and quality decisions and ultimately improve profitability.

A Solutions Approach

Walsh said, “Our solutions approach is really the next big move that Sigmetrix is making – we’re moving away from being just a software company. We consider ourselves now a full-solution provider, and from the enterprise level down to the end user and including all stages in the development process and different roles in a company. Really, everything associated around mechanical variation management.”

As to what makes Sigmetrix solutions unique and differentiated in the marketplace, Walsh proudly said, “I think a big part of it is just what I’m telling you right now, is our solutions approach to it, that again, you can have a very powerful tool that is only being used by an expert user and that’s going to be very difficult to be used by anyone else in that organization, and so the value of that tool is greatly diminished.”

“Unfortunately, sometimes due to human nature, that tool doesn’t really get shared or train the other people. So if those individuals, that one or two or handful of individuals that are experts move on to other positions or retire or whatever the case may be, get promoted, now they have to start from scratch, and they’ve also lost a lot of internal knowledge, and sometimes it’s unfortunately just tribal knowledge. Knowledge capture and knowledge management is a big part of the solution, as well. People are finally getting it that to be competitive they must be less possessive of knowledge.”

In the end, Sigmetrix is all about improving profitability by balancing product quality with manufacturing cost. Sigmetrix makes this possible as customers better understand mechanical variation management maturity level and developing an ongoing improvement plan for optimizing product development.

For More Information: Sigmetrix

Tags: CETOL Sigma 6, EZtol, GD&T, mechanical variation management, Sigmetrix, tolerance, tolerance analysis, tolerance stack-up

Category: Interview

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