Cellbond Composites (www.cellbond.net) of Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire are market leaders of Aluminium Honeycomb structures, including crash test barriers, energy absorbers for the automotive industry, components for the aerospace industry (including helicopter floors), vacuum tables for the print industry and architectural partitions and composite glass flooring panels.

The challenges facing Cellbond to improve product development were: -

• Constant pressure to keep development timescales to an absolute minimum, especially with demanding architectural companies
  
• Many bespoke projects incurring a relatively high design overhead requiring production costs and design time needs to be minimised
  
• Cellbond products were starting to become more complex for the existing 2D design tools and the company needed to develop products in different sectors of the automotive and road safety industry
  
• Many customers were also supplying Cellbond with 3D models of their requirements resulting in compatibility problems
  
• Automating of production processes to save time and money. This involved the design of new product jigs, tooling and plant

From Cellbond's evaluation of competitive products, SolidWorks offered the most user friendly and powerful modelling capabilities together with being the industry standard at an affordable price. SolidWorks also offered compatibility with most other systems.

Benefits
Within a few months of purchasing three licenses of SolidWorks Office Professional, Cellbond have been able to complete projects/products 30-50% quicker resulting in less scrap and re-work. E-drawings have proved useful for communicating ideas and concepts to customers and suppliers. Cosmos Express has been useful for checking loadings on individual components and Animator has been used to produce presentations of products for the Sales department.

Cellbond have also been able to accept new projects that may not have been considered in the past.

Clive Sangster a Director with Cellbond stated, "UK manufacturing always tends to shy away from investment in the latest tools and equipment to remain competitive. Although after seeing just a one-hour presentation of the benefits of SolidWorks, I was convinced that investment would give Cellbond the competitive edge"