Serving industry across India

Shivam Industries (“Shivam”), an ISO 9001:2000-certified company, was established in 1994. From its beginning as a machine shop, the company later diversified into the production of aluminum pressure die-castings. Its castings are used in automobiles and consumer products, instrumentation, and electrical and pneumatic tools. The company also has a rubber molding division. Shivam products include bellows, gaskets, oil seals and antivibration pads, to name a few.

With a high volume of tools being developed each year, Shivam originally outsourced its design work. There were a number of drawbacks to this, including a lack of data security (caused by sharing proprietary information with third parties), the inability to design a part and tooling concurrently, and design errors that disrupted the manufacturing process. In addition, the company had no way to simulate manufacturing operations. Mistakes were discovered on the shop floor, resulting in scrap and rework.

Seamlessly integrated CAD and CAM

With the goal of bringing design work back in house, and ultimately improving design accuracy and productivity, Shivam began its evaluation of computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) solutions, honing its final assessment to a combination of 1) AutoCAD® software and Delcam software or 2) Solid Edge® software and CAM Expresssoftware (from Siemens Digital Industries Software’s Velocity Series™ portfolio).

The evaluation team found the functionality of Solid Edge with CAM Express to be superior in a number of ways. “Only Solid Edge has synchronous technology, which allows designers to quickly edit existing geometry, for faster design changes,” says K. D. Shardul, CEO at Shivam Industries. “In terms of CAM, the Siemens solution supports advanced processes such as core cavity extraction. In addition, Solid Edge offers outstanding drafting capabilities, as well as seamless interoperability between CAD and CAM.” With those advantages, along with the availability of training and ongoing technical support from Expert3D Solutions Private Limited, Shivam was confident in its choice of Solid Edge.

An additional factor in favor of the Siemens solution was the availability of a postprocessor for the company’s TAL vertical machining center, which uses a Siemens SINUMERIK 802D sl controller. “The postprocessor performed perfectly the first time,” says Shardul. “That postprocessor was not available from Delcam.”