VISI ASSISTS ABM TOOL & DIE WITH THE DESIGN OF COMPLEX PROGRESSIVE DIES FOR THE AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY.

At ABM TOOL & DIE, the proof, and the success of the company, is in its processes. With VISI software in their back pocket, the success is sure to keep growing.

“ONE THING THAT WE REALLY HANG OUR HATS ON AS A COMPANY IS THE PROCESS OF HOW OUR DIES ARE DESIGNED AND BUILT,” SAYS MOHAMED I SMAIL, ENGINEERING MANAGER AT ABM TOOL & DIE FOR THE PAST DECADE. “WE REALLY INVEST IN HOW WE PROCESS OUR TOOLS.”

While products and dies manufactured by ABM read like a veritable laundry list, the company primarily serves the automotive sector as a direct-to-OEM, tier-one, and tier-two supplier.

“Our customers are relatively diverse, so we do have some variety, but it’s primarily automotive, and primarily repeat customers,” Mohamed says.

To fulfill its wide range of design and production demands, ABM employs a crew of 150 associates stationed around the globe. The company’s host of facilities includes two stamping and assembly facilities in Ontario; production facilities in Mexico

While the number of dies built annually by the company is in the hundreds, it produces an average number of stamped parts in the millions per year.

In the early 2000s, ABM purchased the VISI CAD/CAM solution, by Vero Software, to fulfill its complex range of tool and die needs.

Having found that its former solution was not keeping pace with an evolving manufacturing landscape, ABM sought a solution that could handle increasingly challenging design demands. The company receives CAD software support from Tecno Cad Cam, the Ontario-based distributor for VISI in Canada.

“As time went on and stamping got more complex, there needed to be a way to handle it,” says Mohamed, who works in the company’s headquarters in Brampton, Ontario, but collaborates closely with also different external die designers

“The software we use has to be complex enough to do what it needs to do, but simple enough that people who aren’t engineers are able to visualize what they need to see. We can see how quickly our employees can pick VISI up as compared to the software that we have tried to use in the past.”

“Our simulation of what we were proving out in terms of our form process was a challenge,” he says. “Regarding surfacing and modelling, I have yet to meet anyone who can do what our designers can do with VISI. The ease with which we can create complex surfaces in VISI is critical for us.”

VISI delivers a dynamic, flexible structure within which designers are able to manipulate solids, surfaces, wireframes, or a combination of all three. VISI surfacing technology offers a varied set of tools and methods tailored to assist in an organic, free-form creation of geometry.

Surface modelling functions within VISI include ruled, lofted, drive, sweep, n-sided patch, drape, tangent, draft, revolved, and piped surfaces. Paired with the software’s advanced editing capability, this varied set of modelling commands simplifies the process of healing imported geometry and constructing complicated 3D data.

As ABM primarily builds progressive and transfer dies, the company takes advantage of VISI’s numerous strip-layout tools to quickly answer questions posed by customers.

“Our customers demand to have answers quickly, in terms of cost and design. We noticed that VISI stays up to date with the features we need, and that has made it easier to fulfill those demands.” Mohamed says

Specifically, Mohamed notes that VISI helps ABM to quickly and easily create the company’s strip layouts and parts forming process.

Beginning with the developed component blank, VISI makes it simple to rapidly generate an efficient 3D strip layout with its automatic blank alignment, rotation, and optimization tools.

The software also offers an automatic 2D strip plan, including fold lines, making both punch design and layout more effective.

Designed to deliver flexibility and customization for the designer, VISI offers a range of automatic and semi-automatic capabilities that help with the generation of shearing punches. Once created, those punches may be dynamically moved to different stages in the strip with a simple drag-and-drop process.

Likewise, the positioning of 3D folding stages onto the strip is seamless, and the strip can just as easily accommodate reductions and increases in the number of stages. To test for the validity and performance of the design, the 3D strip can be simulated at any point in the design process.

Another tool used frequently by Mohamed and his team is the VISI assembly manager, which “works well to help organize the design,” he says.

The assembly manager allows the designer to rapidly add and access critical data required for the bill of material, including Det Number, Description, Material, Supplier and so on.

Mohamed also takes advantage of VISI’s collision detection capabilities, which alert the designer that the virtual design will run into very real trouble once it hits the shop floor.

“It’s important to be able to see, when we design dies, that there may be a problem that we haven’t anticipated.”

ABM Tool and Die recently started to use the VISI Motion study simulation, to check and validate the transfer arms movements …