Auer Product Line Goes 3D....

Since 1982 Auer Precision has been the leader in the semiconductor industry in the development and manufacture of the transport media that carries all the various semiconductor packages thru the many manufacturing processes.  Auer boats/carriers, film frames and magazines are used by all the major players in the semiconductor industry.

Yeah I sound like the marketing department...   I can't help it, Auer makes some great products and is a great company to work for and I am proud to toot our horn every so often.

We not only design the transport media, we also design/build the tooling we use to manufacture all of these products.  Through the years we have developed in the range of 25,000 unique boats alone.  That is an incredible amount of tooling besides the product drawings we have cataloged.

The cool thing is if you called us today and wanted a carrier that we first designed say 15-20 years ago, in a minute or two I could have the product and tool drawings in hand.  We could walk over to our stamping department and in another couple minutes our die maintenance guys would have the insert tooling out on the work bench ready to set-up in one of our master dies.  We have some very cool web-based systems in place to be able to keep track of all of our designs.

Back in 2003 we transitioned to SolidWorks for all of our new contract tool and automation systems design.  We currently have three engineers, besides myself, that work full time in SolidWorks on our non-product line work orders.  We have been experiencing the advantages of working in 3D and reaping the rewards with some very successful projects.

The one fly in the ointment was our product line, which was still being designed in 2D.  The reasons are many and are all shared by any company that has been in the design field for any number of years.

We have an extensive library of 2D data files to draw from to copy and clone into new product.  Our procedures for creating our designs were well understood and we were very efficient at turning around our designs in Engineering.  The major component for the resistance to change was our key product designer was very comfortable working in AutoCAD.  Making the transition to SolidWorks in our product line was going to involve some pain for a time and it was easier to just go with the flow of our old 2D design process.

That all changed a couple months ago.  Our product line guru left the company to pursue new career opportunities and I was given the challenge to become the new product line guru and to bring our product line design into the 3D world and SolidWorks.

We anticipate it is going to take me a year or so to be exposed to the majority of the different design possibilities within our product line.  I need to cram as much knowledge as I can, as quickly as possible, into my personal knowledge base that our company has gained in 26 years of manufacturing transport media.  So I have a bit of a double whammy in the transition; in needing to develop all the models and techniques to efficiently create our product line designs in SolidWorks and also learn all the nuances of the product line itself.

So far the process has been going as expected.  I have some good days where I am very efficient and I have some bad days where it seems I need to re-do things to many times.  I don't consider it work until I have to do it a second time.  On the designs types that I am seeing for the second, third time I am definitely getting quicker and am gaining more confidence in my design decisions.  I am starting to see more good days, then bad.  I am also starting to envision some of the new ways we can use our 3D data to help with the sales and marketing efforts of our product line.

One thing is for sure is I am having a great time with the challenge and really enjoy heading into work every day.

Comments

[Mike W.]

That's awesome Anna, I'm glad the PL is finally shedding some of the old hangups and move into that mystical 3rd dimension. Hope you didn't have to re-do too many of my old models. :p

[Mike W.]

That's awesome Anna, I'm glad the PL is finally shedding some of the old hangups and move into that mystical 3rd dimension. Hope you didn't have to re-do too many of my old models. :p