Manufacturing Facility Upgrades
Installed view of platform span doubler.
How many times have you been involved with an install as a project manager, engineer, millwright or are working in the impacted facility, and some glaringly obvious collision has ground work to a complete stop? It’s a trick question, because most mechanical design and implementations must travel through this region of a project. While the adoption and realization of digital twins still progressing, it’s not too early or too late to benefit from a digital twin workflow. Risk in high cost areas and implantations easily justify a modest and effective engineering budget to prevent cost and timeline overruns.
If you’re hearing the phrases, digital twin, BIM, and still hearing about unanticipated facility, machine and process collisions - chances are you know you need to enhance your design and planning, but haven’t done fully.
Cascading Changes
A long lead large piece of equipment was ordered in advance of project completion and facility installation. After the supporting equipment was installed, it became apparent one of the enhancements for this larger piece of equipment would land in a fork lift path. This necessitated a platform support span doubling, custom cable tray, and cable routing study.
We work with local metal fabricators and local machine shops for our customers requiring large scale fabrication and installation close to their base of operations - regional and global businesses with ties here in Middle Tennessee. With high quality and explicit drawings, we also have the ability to work with national and global manufacturers. Conveying design intent is our specialty.
Even with supplier data, it’s not always enough
At the onset of this project, despite having an excellent BIM reference of the overall larger machine, there was inadequate detail to design below a facility impact level. Vendor provided machine data was augmented with localized scan data to ensure there were no collisions at the time of installation of the bespoke facility improvements.
We collect our own data, and have the ability to work with point cloud data and laser scans from any vendor. This data gets rolled into your virtual twin, enhancing the representation and detail level of your facility. The best time to start modeling your facility is 10 years ago, and today.
This project was built and installed with inhouse fabrication drawings, BOMs and Middle Tennessee local fabricators.
Total cost on this project for turnkey manufacturing drawing packages, calculations for loading, CAD and associated scanning work was slightly less than $10,000 usd. This included 22 weldment and part drawings that were sent to a fab shop, all documentation, solidworks native files, assembly EASM references and bills of material.