The Challenge The Sub-Zero Freezer Company is the leading manufacturer of luxury residential refrigeration, freezer, and wine storage units. Founded in 1945, the company led the industry by perfecting the storage of frozen foods at below-zero temperatures and by pioneering built-in refrigeration. Its products, built by hand in the U.S., offer the ultimate in performance, reliability, and design in part with help from SolidWorks 3D mechanical design software.
With SolidWorks, the speed with which we can turn things around and upgrade even a complete series of our models is incredible.
John Andrews, Senior Drafter
The Solution
SolidWorks allows Sub-Zero to preserve the intent of the industrial designer while meeting manufacturing needs. With SolidWorks the company can take files right from the industrial designer, make changes quickly and easily to fit its manufacturing operation, and get the engineering data to the manufacturing floor “almost immediately.” SolidWorks also expedites many development processes. Using SolidWorks, the company can quickly make sheet metal parts and generate the 2D drawings – with the assurance that the part will be right the first time. Sub-Zero can also upgrade a complete series of a product model quickly and easily, thanks to SolidWorks parametric and configuration management capabilities. With the SolidWorks translation capabilities, its fast and simple to send models of injection-molded parts out in various formats to vendors to get quotes. And the company also uses SMARTEAM to link its Madison design operations and its Phoenix facility, which checks progress on ECOs. SMARTEAM provides version control and ensures people are working with the correct version, which is especially important in cases where there are up to 56 or 57 revisions of the same Sub-Zero part.
