Castings for many uses

Hi-Con Technocast Pvt. Ltd. (Hi-Con), established in 2003, is devoted to producing a complete spectrum of investment castings using the lost-wax process for both ferrous and non-ferrous metals. The company makes castings used in pumps and valves, automotive and transportation components, medical implants, and oil and gas equipment.

Since its inception, this India-based company has gradually expanded its reach to buyers in other countries. Hi-Con is managed by highly qualified, technical professionals with two decades of experience in investment casting and metallurgy. Its quality management system has received ISO 9001:2008 certification, PED/97/23/EC standards compliance and AD Merkblatt W0 certification.

Outsourced design work slowed the process 

At first, Hi-Con outsourced the die design portion of casting development. This added to the cycle time for the castings, however, and put some jobs in jeopardy. “Our customers ask us within what time frame we can deliver the end products, and if we delay the delivery we lose our customers,” says Bhavesh Makadia, international sales coordinator at Hi-Con. In an effort to speed casting development, Hi-Con’s management decided to bring die design in-house. Before that could be done, management wanted computer-aided design (CAD) software that could handle complex die shapes. The decision was made to evaluate CAD options and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) alternatives at the same time.

Hi-Con reviewed solutions from Parametric Technology Corporation, DelCAM and Siemens Digital Industries Software. Hi-Con chose Solid Edge® software and CAM Express software, both from Siemens Digital Industries Software. The company selected Solid Edge and CAM Express in part because of the tight integration between the two solutions. Another factor was Siemens’ strong reputation. “Siemens is a great brand and when we tell people in our industry that we use Siemens products in-house, they rely on us completely,” says Hariom Upadhyay, general manager at Hi-Con.

Among the technical features of Solid Edge with synchronous technology that Hi-Con particularly likes are its synchronous-based modeling capability and the fact that the solution is built on Parasolid® software, also developed by Siemens.

With synchronous technology, the user no longer has to choose between constraint-driven or history-free modeling; unlike some other systems, “constraint programming” isn’t needed to re-use a model for other design purposes; and data from multiple CAD systems is immediately usable.

The Parasolid factor was also attractive. Parasolid is the world’s leading 3D solid modeling component software and it is used as the foundation of many Siemens products, such as Solid Edge and CAM Express. Parasolid is also licensed to many of the leading independent software vendors (ISVs) on a level-playing field basis. These ISVs develop hundreds of applications based on Parasolid in the product design and analysis market space. With Parasolid, ISVs can reliably share data.

Finally, CAM Express not only provides powerful numerical control (NC) programming with a low total cost of ownership, but is seamlessly integrated with Solid Edge.

“All these factors gave us confidence in Siemens product lifecycle management (PLM) technology,” explains Manish Khachar, director at Hi-Con.