Sigmetrix: An Update on Mechanical Variation Management

We recently interviewed Ed Walsh, VP of Global Sales at Sigmetrix for an update on the company, its technologies, and the state of the industry. Like our previous discussion, during the interview, he spoke how the company continues to be focused on helping customer design and build better products through mechanical variation management. “Sigmetrix is unique because it’s not just a software company, but also a service and training company that together provide a comprehensive solutions approach for our customers,” Walsh said.

When asked for a little background on himself and Sigmetrix, Walsh said, “Over the past 20+ years in the industry I’ve witnessed a need that customers have conveyed – 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”.

Reflecting on his first job, Walsh said, “I worked for a company that was an OEM to heavy equipment manufacturers, such as John Deere, Caterpillar, Case, and New Holland. Mostly John Deere, but we also built operator enclosures for the other companies. The company I worked for itself had, up until me starting there, really did more contract manufacturing and not much design work. At that time, the engineers were doing design work on giant sheets of vellum and using pencils and manual drafting tools. I was part of the first dedicated team of designers using a very early version of Pro/ENGINEER. We were given a general idea for CAD with functional requirements, but no design parameters”.

MCADCafe Interviews Ed Walsh, VP Global Sales, Sigmetrix

“The great part for me was that I had the ability to go out to the pattern maker that was right next to our CAD workstations and say, ‘Hey, I want to make something like this’, and they could mock it up, and I could see how the parts were fitting together and where are they going to fit, and did it make sense from functional and manufacturing standpoints. If we needed something bigger, we could go down to the production line, but it gave me a really good idea of what actually was happening once the design concept left my CAD station. Overall, it was a really good experience for me”.

The Meaning of Mechanical Variation Management

Sigmetrix’s mission statement is “Better products through mechanical variation management.” We asked Walsh if he could elaborate on what that means.

“I know that statement’s a mouthful, and I think the way we can best describe it is by defining what variation actually is. Variation can represent any number of things between the viscosity of a fluid or the amount of flow through a circuit, just based on the random variation of how things work in the world, for example, weather”.

“Specifically, mechanical variation is based on a function of manufacturing processes that nothing is ever quite as big or quite as small as we expect it to be. When you’re just building a single part, that’s fine, but when a lot of parts have to go together and that has to be done many times, and you need to interchange those parts, that can become a problem. So mechanical variation in the mechanical part, which is what we are focused on, is that variation associated with the variability of the manufacturing of the parts and assemblies that go into a product”.

Sigmetrix is well aware that variation affects products as they’re being built and is one the company’s main tenets of its mission.

Walsh said, “As products are being built, variation could have a few possible effects. One is that when they go to put parts together in an assembly, the parts will no longer fit because they will be running into each other, so somebody might have to go out with a grinder or a crowbar and try to fit them together. Or, it could be that they try to account for that by making really big oversized gaps, but then the product doesn’t really have a good feel with regard to quality, or it might just slow down the production of that product. And then finally, they might just scrap some of those parts, and when you’re talking about some very expensive machine parts, that scrap could cost millions of dollars per year across all products for that manufacturer”.

Sigmetrix helps customers with these variation issues in a number of ways. According to Walsh, “We help customers by balancing cost and quality, we help them by achieving a faster time to market, delivering more of innovative products, capturing, transferring and retaining critical product process knowledge, all around the idea of mechanical variation. We are specialists in that area and with tools and training and other services, our solution set as a whole, that’s where we are actually helping customers manage that variation better”.

Sigmetrix can help customers:

• 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

Mechanical Variation for Individuals and Organizations

During the previous interview Walsh shared the company’s vision of how understanding mechanical variation can help an organization as a whole. But what does that mean to individual engineers or designers and how does it fit into the vision on a smaller scale?

“Unfortunately, some design teams today still ignore mechanical variation, or maybe it’s just a check box in a project plan. I’ve been spending a lot of time on Zoom calls with customers over the last year, and I am somewhat surprised that both  management and engineers have a misconception that the CAD model itself, if everything is perfect in the CAD model nominally, the job is more or less done. In essence, they’re ignoring it and passing it down to other groups in the organization, like manufacturing inspection. This is really a disservice to both the company and its customers because they’re adding costs to the products and they’re potentially creating products that are going to fail”.

“Again, it has been a bit of a surprise to me that this is still an area that for some companies is a new idea. There tends to be a disconnect with the manufacturing and inspection groups, and also there is a negative effect on the engineering teams themselves, in terms of what their job is. You’re not just making a CAD model, and granted they have become proficient in tools like CAE and they understand their PLM system, but at the end of the day, an engineer is the engineer. In my first job out of engineering school I was fortunate enough to work at a company where the product design and manufacturing groups were very close, and I learned a lot through that”.

Earlier, Walsh mentioned earlier that CAD models, don’t tell the whole story, but what exactly is missing?

“When we talk about variation, the CAD model is giving you a value. In the real world, in any surface that’s on that single part could be a little bit bigger, a little bit smaller, also it could be at a different angle than what you would expect it to be. In addition, in the real world, you can’t really have something like a flat plane with a 90-degree angle and then two flat planes merging to it, that just doesn’t exist because you’re never going to have those touch exactly that way. You’re never going to have a full surface contact. In manufacturing it’s called a 3-2-1; three points of contact, two-point, one-point. By having this view that if everything is perceived as great with the CAD model, but not having the ability to understand what’s really going on. That’s what’s missing”.

Manufacturing and Inspection Interaction and Sigmetrix’s Approach

Walsh was asked about the importance of the interaction and the manufacturing and inspection groups.

“An engineer might not have either the forethought or some input or insight from the manufacturing team, could try to make something that cannot be manufactured manufacturable. They might locate different features off of each other that are highly sensitive to variation, they might try to take a very small part and put a very tight tolerance on it, that can’t be controlled whatsoever. So having that kind of interface with the manufacturing group and then on to the inspection group, because again, they’re just as important. Are these parts being made the way we expect them to be made, so that that is really important, and also I think that is missing to some degree”.

And what has been Sigmetrix’s approach to this?

“Our flagship product is CETOL, originally it was called TITOL many years ago when we were a part of the Texas Instruments. When they spun off, they gave the name CETOL, and a lot of people ask me what that name is, and at the time, one of the big buzzwords was concurrent engineering (CE), that essentially, you are having this conversation between manufacturing design and inspection and in other parts of the organization, and as business buzzwords go, that term fell by the wayside. Eventually, it became Six Sigma, then Lean, then Agile or whatever else the buzzword was, but the core principles behind all of them are still valid. From the inception of how our tool was designed and they are protected by that flagship tool. That was the thought process and everything that we’ve done since then, whether it be our services or our training offerings or new products that we’re rolling out, that’s been done with that mindset that this is a tool that should in fact be. For lack of better words, or maybe a hub of communication between these different groups, so that they can all be on the page and speaking the same language”.

What’s New with Sigmetrix’s Offerings

“In the last year, we’ve been very busy, and we talked a little bit last time about our computer-based training products, since then we have rolled out quite a few additional new products and some are products on how to use our software tools. Some of them are products on how to use our software tools or embed them in PTC’s Creo, which is the GD&T advisor and EZtol, and then some are basically more domain tools, GD&T, basic tolerance stack up in that end and so on. And that library is going to continue to grow. And we’ve also enhanced it to allow it to be a little bit more of a domain tool where it can be rolled out to an organization on a larger scale, and the management of that organization can kind of see what the progress is of the students, are these things making sense? They are following a curriculum, and a lot of companies are very excited about that, because it really fits their need for education, particularly today, where I think the new generation really likes something that’s more of a, ‘I can do it at my time, I can fast forward’”.

“Our educational content model is analogous to going to YouTube to learn something. In addition, we really expanded the GD&T capability and functionality of our flagship CETOL product, which many customers are very happy about, and that’s going to continue to go on through the rest of this year and the next year, constantly adding new functionality and proving the functionality we have and ease of use as well. And then finally, we really are starting to see some growth on our easy tall product, which is a 1D tool, that is for NX, Catia and SOLIDWORKS market”. And with that tool, companies are now saying, ‘Hey, this does make sense, it’s a viable choice for replacing spreadsheets’. Because now we are taking the PMI information from the CAD model, which is the intended dimensioning scheme and intolerance information that was designed in. A user can quickly create a tolerance model at 1D space, and then that model will very soon be able to feed into a 3D model. The ecosystem or the structure of all these products is growing just as we have planned strategically. And I think that the maturity of companies in terms of mechanical variation management enables acceleration of that curve exponentially”.

For More Information: Sigmetrix

Tags: CETOL Sigma 6, Ed Walsh, EZtol, GD&T, Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing, MBD, MBE, mechanical variation management, PMI, Sigmetrix, tolerance, tolerance analysis, tolerance stack-up, Video Interview

Category: Interview

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