CAT Tale - A Customer Success Story

Inspire Design - Middleton, WI
Website: http://www.inspire-design.com/
Industry: Design & Engineering Services

The Challenge

The Inspire Design Group (www.inspire-design.com) is a full-service product development firm that is based on three core competencies: industrial design, mechanical engineering and prototyping & model making. The Middleton, WI based company faces three primary challenges, as do most design engineering firms: communicating with clients, maintaining an educated staff of innovative engineers, and aligning with best-in-class companies for engineering tools and services.

The Solution

By partnering with Computer Aided Technology, and adopting SolidWorks as its primary CAD platform, Inspire Design has tackled its three main aforementioned challenges.

“Since our clients drive what we do and determine what engineering tools we use, we use SolidWorks most often for product engineering,” said Inspire Design Principal and Chief Design Officer, Doug Birkholz.

Birkholz added that as SolidWorks continues to dominate the 3D mechanical CAD industry, he cannot help but recognize it as the industry standard. He said that SolidWorks even gives him an advantage in terms of new business sales.

“When I’m making a sales call, and the prospect asks me what solid modeling platform we use, I can say SolidWorks and that’s one less objection that I have to overcome,” said Birkholz.

Inspire Design abides by a unique philosophy called “Inspirevation™.” That’s a combination of inspiration (their clients’ ideas and concepts) and innovation (Inspire Engineers’ creative expertise and technical abilities). Birkholz said using SolidWorks helps them communicate better internally and to the customer, and deliver highly innovative designs.

“SolidWorks is ideal for helping engineers develop their CAD skills. It’s much more user friendly than other systems,” Birkholz said of his team that consists of 4 engineers, 2 industrial designers and 2 model makers. “If we want to reverse-engineer a full model, we are able to do that and capture the form very accurately with SolidWorks.”

Birkholz also added that partnering with CATI has kept him and his company at the forefront of the engineering community. With a desire to become more involved with local SolidWorks Users Groups, and to learn how to better utilize SolidWorks within their organization, Birkholz is an avid reader of CATI’s TechLinks eNewsletter.

“I find it to be a very valuable resource,” said Birkholz. “I like reading about what other people have done with their SolidWorks software, how they’ve incorporated it into their business. It gives us information that we most likely would not come across on our own.”

The Summary & Metrics

Using SolidWorks, the Inspire Design Group created a garage storage product called the “Flip Clip®.” From concept to manufacturing, Birkholz and business partner Jim Boda, noticed a need in the marketplace for such a product, and turned their own inspiration into true innovation. The FlipClip® (flipclipstorage.com) is now being distributed and sold at various retailers, including Ace Hardware, True-Value and Target.

By using SolidWorks for projects like the Flip Clip®, Inspire Design has enjoyed the following benefits:

Better communications with our clients and their suppliers

“We’re able to create CAD models of a concept and then send an e-drawing of the part to our client for review. Their engineers and marketing people can see the design direction the project is taking. Making changes easier at this point is much less expensive than modifying the tooling.”

Reduction and even elimination of opportunity costs

“In a highly competitive marketplace, timing is everything. Having the right product with the feature/benefit package their customers are looking for can mean the difference between getting the sale and reaping the benefits or missing a window of opportunity.”

Faster time-to-market, faster time-to decision

“SolidWorks is a tool that allows information to be shared with the entire group. Buy in on a product concept is done earlier and less time is spent on costly revisions done later in the product development
process.”