Greece Lightning - Speeding up the design process

VASSILIADIS P. - VASSILIADIS D. OE (Kilkis, Greece) is a precision tool and die maker for the plastics industry. Originally founded in 1989 by Pavlos and Dimitris Vassiliadis, the mould making company now employ 15 staff with a turnover in excess of 1,000,000 Euros.

After starting with AutoCad for 2D tool design, the company decided to evaluate the software market when the industry began to move towards 3D as a standard way of data distribution. "We were beginning to find bottlenecks in our design process as we were having difficulty in handling 3D data and the software we were using was not focussed on mould design" claims George Vassiliadis, Chief Design Engineer.

After evaluating the complete software market, VASILIADIS P. - VASILIADIS D. OE purchased the VISI suite of CADCAM software in 2000.  "Our shopfloor was full of machines including an Okuma mx45, Haas VM3-HE, Haas VF2, Sacem 110 and Johnford VMC550 machining centre and we needed to ensure we chose software that would maximise the productivity of every machine." states Owner and General Manager Pavlos Vassiliadis. “Keeping the milling machines fed with work is crucial,” continues Pavlos. For this reason, virtually all NC programming is off-line. Complete programs are generated using VISI Machining and downloaded ready for each new set-up, with everything geared to achieving maximum productivity without compromising quality.

“We’ve been using VISI software for about eight years now,” says Pavlos. “It is a very good system and although there was a learning jump from 2D to 3D,  the software made it easy to get going - we were quickly very comfortable in the 3D environment.”

Originally installing VISI Modelling, VISI Mould and VISI Machining, the mould making specialists have recently added VISI Flow for plastic flow analysis as well as installing PEPS Wire EDM after an acquisition of Camtek Limited by Vero Software. "The support has been great" claims  George Vassiliadis, "I communicate with my dealer (NC Solutions) and if necessary it goes further up the ladder. The most important thing is that when something is urgent it is always dealt with as urgent. We try to keep up-to-date with our software, this includes the monthly product updates which are always very useful. Any issues we report are generally resolved in the next versions and even some of our enhancement suggestions have been added."

The benefits of VISI were highlighted in a recent project for a complex two impression tool for a large water pipe T-junction with o-ring cavity, in which the software was used from the start. "We have streamlined our entire design process. There are no longer any issues with data transfer between products and the integrated product environment allows anyone from the shopfloor or drawing office to extract the information they require".

Commenting on the decision to work closely with local dealer NC solutions and the decision to choose VISI, General Manager, Pavlos Vassiliadis concludes, "VISI provided exactly what we were looking for and offers an excellent price-performance ratio. The tight delivery schedule of our last project was a challenge for us and after the project was complete, we were left in no doubt that without the VISI software, we would be unable to compete in such a competitive environment".

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