De Manincor S.p.a. (Gardolo, Italy) has been in the business of making professional kitchen machines for more than 170 years. Today, the company designs and manufactures unique home ranges and cooking plates, as well as designing modular professional kitchens. All of its appliances are made at its only factory, in Trento, Italy.
De Manincor products are known for their balance of form, sol-idity, and material selection, but also for the company’s attention to detail and design.
“We create exclusive models, which can be combined with extreme flexibility, to satisfy the needs of big and well-known chefs,” says company owner Walter de Manincor.
But the specialized nature of its appliances brought special challenges, and in the last decade the company faced problems regarding the growing development needs of its unique products and parts. These issues posed a barrier to the company’s need to start industrializing the production process.
“Our design cycle foresees the passage from the draft project to the executive project, until it enters the factory and returns from assembling stations, within a time frame of several weeks,” explains de Manincor. “And all this clashes with the market requirement, where the series production starts from prefabricated elements which are stored and assembled on customer request.”
The company went in search of a design software solution that could design and produce unique parts for a diverse range of customer requirements, while increasing part precision and decreasing actual production times. The OEM made the decision to use Solid Edge from Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software (Plano, TX, U.S.).
“The deciding factors for our selection have been the simplicity and dynamics which the Siemens PLM product offers us for the plate working,” says de Manincor production manager Silvano Marchi.
No More Prototypes Required
The software allows the appliance maker to create and visualize the product models directly in 3-D, eliminating prototype production and speeding up time to market. Gianpaolo Businaro, development and design manager, explains what the software means for prototype design: “The ease with which a tinned plate component forms itself and grows, is then assembled, and forms the basis for the construction of new components is mind-blowing! Nothing is left to the imagination anymore. You can view it from all sides and take a section through it as if nothing happened.”
Businaro explains that the company uses the software to find problem areas of the design and make changes, after which the other design elements are automatically updated. “It is very easy to obtain mechanical details combined with the precision of a photograph,” he says. “The prototype is available at the end of working with a coloring process, and graphical rendering can also be animated.”
Businaro says de Manincor benefited greatly in terms of time savings, precision, and design results, and found the software to be a valuable tool for helping produce unique, tailor-made parts.
Marchi says the user-friendliness of the software, and the speed with which it can be learned, have allowed the company to speed up product modification projects, “starting with tables and individual drawings and ending up with changed and complete structures in a very short time...unthinkable before.”
Today, the appliance maker finds it can make changes more easily, resulting in shorter project times and facilitating collaboration with its customers—some of the most exclusive restaurants in Italy.
www.siemens.com/solidedge
www.demanincor.it
