Established in 1908, Willingshofer GmbH is a family business managed by fourth-generation owners. The company designs and manufactures custom industrial equipment, mainly for global customers in the iron and steel, electrical equipment and plant building industries. With about 80 employees, the company generates annual revenues of roughly €14 million.

From blacksmith to industrial equipment manufacturer

The primary business of Willingshofer GmbH is custom manufacturing of heavy machinery, including conveyor systems and industrial furnaces as well as hoisting and turning fixtures.

Located in a remote valley in southeastern Austria, the owner-managed family business was established as a blacksmith in 1908. During the 1980s, the company shifted its focus from agricultural to industrial customers. In addition to designing and manufacturing industrial equipment, Willingshofer also acts as a contract manufacturer.

For computer-aided design (CAD), Willingshofer engineers use Solid Edge. Our 3D CAD software was deployed by the company in 2010. “Over time, it replaced a legacy software product that was well established but had decisive weaknesses,” says Johannes Huber, design engineer at Willingshofer. “Models created and edited using Solid Edge are fully associative, and the software has far reaching compatibility with other systems.”

This also proves an advantage when it comes to creating programs for the company’s heterogeneous collection of numerically controlled (NC) machine tools. Production specialists in the manufacturing department use NX™ software from Siemens for computer-aided manufacturing (CAM). They use NX CAM to create and simulate NC programs based on 2D and 3D data from Solid Edge and other CAD systems.

“Using NX CAM, our colleagues import models and drawings that come in all kinds of file formats from customers for contract manufacturing,” says Huber. “Due to the software’s built-in CAD capabilities, they don’t need the engineering department to make the minor modifications that are often required during the manufacturing process.”

Willingshofer makes use of Mechatronics Concept Designer™ software, also a part of the NX suite, which has easy-to-use modeling and simulation capabilities that enable the user to quickly create and validate alternative kinematic design concepts early in the development cycle. They evaluated several material transfer concepts involving pushers, a turnstile and lifting mechanisms before deciding to adopt a purely ballistic concept. Unlike a model-based tool, Mechatronics Concept Designer allows the user not only to see what the design looks like, but validate that it works.