4VISTAGY, Inc. Product type: CAD/engineering software

Global HQ: Waltham, Massachusetts, USA

Opened: 1991

Web: www.vistagy.com

In today’s hyper-competitive automotive industry, there’s no substitute for getting new designs to market quickly. This is equally true for seat trim covers, which play an important role in defining the aesthetics of vehicle interiors. Faurecia, the sixth largest automotive supplier in the world, recognized the need to improve the speed, efficiency, and quality of its seat trim process, and found the answer in VISTAGY’s Seat Design Environment™ (SDE) software (pictured here in use by Faurecia designers).

1

VISTAGY, Inc. is a leading global provider of industry-specific engineering software and services that enable engineers to efficiently create rich product descriptions for better-informed decision-making early in development. The Massachusetts-based company (founded in 1991) has sales and support offices throughout North and South America, Asia and Europe, and boasts nearly 300 customers and over 4,500 software users. SDE is the first seat design software application to address the entire seat engineering process. It allows engineers to capture a complete digital product definition of a seat system, accurately and efficiently share design detail, increase the reuse of engineering data and eliminate extensive physical prototyping. That is why companies such as Faurecia Group, General Motors and Lear use SDE to reduce cost, improve quality, and cut time to market.

2

SDE enabled Faurecia to cut the time it took to develop the first prototype of a seat trim cover by 20 percent, provided a master model that was tailored to the needs of the seat trim engineer, increased the accuracy of its bids, and reduced the cost of the entire process. “There’s no question that SDE has transformed our seat trim cover processes and enhanced our competitiveness,” says Nicolas Michot, manager of Faurecia’s R&D Seat Division and senior trim expert. Faurecia, which is based in Nanterre, France, has four business groups: Automotive Seating, Emissions Control Technologies, Interior Systems, and Automotive Exteriors. The company works with many of the world’s leading automotive manufacturers, including Volkswagen, PSA-Peugeot-Citroen, Ford, Renault-Nissan and BMW.

3

12

5

3 4

58 autumn 2011

4 Pictured here are seats designed by Faurecia for the Mitsubishi Colt, created using VISTAGY’s SDE software in conjunction with the CATIA V5 platform. “Based on our comparison, SDE offered the best compatibility with all systems used by Faurecia and allows the most intelligent design-to-manufacturing process,” says Michot. Typically, the automotive seat trim cover process starts with a bid. OEMs provide suppliers with a seat trim outline and ask them to provide pricing and a delivery date. Having the ability to generate a bid quickly – and accurately – enables suppliers to identify product costs and producibility issues as soon as possible and make any necessary changes. SDE facilitates this process because it has a utility for exporting data directly into a supplier’s or OEM’s cost model, thus enabling it to quickly calculate a bid based on its parameters and requirements. “The best part of SDE is that it provides us with an early calculation of the cover cost, which gives us a competitive advantage, especially when submitting a bid,” says Michot. “It also enables us to react quickly to manufacturing issues. SDE helped us reduce the cost of the entire design-to-manufacturing process.”

“There’s no question that SDE has transformed our seat trim cover processes and enhanced our competitiveness” – Nicolas Michot, Faurecia R&D Seat Division

Prior to implementing SDE, Faurecia used a 2D CAD process with work being performed manually. The foam was developed first and then the flat patterns for the seat trim cover were created by hand, which greatly increased the time it took to develop the patterns. Using SDE, engineers are able to deliver the first pattern more quickly because they can create it virtually without the foam. With SDE, the foam pad can be built in parallel. Current 3D CAD systems provide the necessary geometry, but not a way to easily author the non-geometric data required to fully define a seat trim cover — which requires 5,000 bits of data for a single seat cushion, backrest, and headrest. Since SDE is fully integrated into commercial 3D CAD systems, it’s possible to capture geometric and non-geometric data in a way that is perfectly intuitive to seat trim engineers. Creating a CAD-based master model enables engineers to spend more time on designing and innovating, rather than doing non-value added tasks, such as re-entering data, creating drawings, and manually generating flat patterns. “If a firm wants to be competitive in the world’s automotive market, it

must enable its engineering and design teams to easily author and share information and expertise,” points out Michot. “A common CAD-based interface for trim design makes it easier to have common engineering processes for sharing information, improvements, and best practices.” The importance of the master model is magnified in the supply chain – currently, there is no efficient way for data to be exchanged between OEMs, Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers. Using a detailed CAD master model facilitates faster interaction between OEMs and suppliers by allowing more detailed data-driven communication about design, manufacturing challenges and costs. Ultimately, Faurecia found that the key to developing a more efficient process was using a CAD-integrated environment where geometric and non-geometric information could be captured and linked within a single master model, allowing engineers and other key personnel to efficiently create and modify trim cover product definitions and associated manufacturing and financial data. In the highly competitive world of seat trim covers, that kind of efficiency pays off.

5

59autumn 2011