Itaminas is a world leader in supplying equipment and services associated with mining and iron ore extraction. Since 1959 the company has grown by investing in technological improvements and updating its processes to guarantee large-scale production that meets the market’s growing demand. Today, the company’s equipment produces around 6.5 million tons of iron ore per year.
Itaminas uses SOLIDWORKS to develop and design its products. In 2022, the company connected SOLIDWORKS to the cloud-based 3DEXPERIENCE platform and added modeling, collaboration, data management, and communication solutions from the 3DEXPERIENCE Works portfolio.
Increasing collaboration and flexibility
The cloud-based platform allowed Itaminas’s designers and engineers to gain greater flexibility, collaborate more effectively, and improve quality while traveling less.
“With the 3DEXPERIENCE Works solutions, time to market accelerated by about 60%, since designers and engineers can access project information and complete projects in the cloud without needing to travel to the client site or be in the office,” notes Leonardo Malta, engineering supervisor at Itaminas. “A project that used to take two to three days, we can now do in one day. We have become extremely efficient and productive in a smart and affordable way, because with the 3DEXPERIENCE Works solutions, we can literally see everything in the palm of our hands and make adjustments quickly.”
Eliminating errors and improving profit margins
Adding 3DEXPERIENCE Works solutions to its SOLIDWORKS implementation allowed Itaminas to eliminate design errors and the associated scrap, rework, and plant downtime. Now the plants run 24 hours a day. In addition, Itaminas’s designers gained the bandwidth to absorb work previously done by outside designers, saving US$25,000 per project. Since the company creates everything in-house, prototyping costs were significantly reduced.
Furthermore, after the first 10 projects, the company eliminated ore contamination issues and the associated contamination fines, generating a very high gross margin gain. Malta emphasizes: “The benefits of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform are immeasurable, because we simply could not sustain our production level if we kept working the traditional way.”
Gaining competitiveness
Malta concludes: “With the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, our designers and engineers can complete and manage work better and do it faster, which increases profit margins. In short, the platform lets us do much more with fewer resources and less plant downtime. Whoever isn’t working in the cloud will struggle to compete.”
If you’d like to learn more about how SOLIDWORKS and 3DEXPERIENCE Works can improve your product development process, contact your local reseller. Read the full case study here.
Follow more Itaminas news at: https://www.itaminas.com.br/noticias/
