Kenwood, the well-known manufacturer of household appliances, is carrying out all its new product design work on 17 Indigo2 workstations from Silicon Graphics, running SDRC's I-DEAS computer-aided design software.
Kenwood Appliances is a long-established UK manufacturer of small kitchen appliances and related products. The company is perhaps best known for its mixers and food processors, especially the Kenwood Chef. The Kenwood Group operates worldwide, with turnover in 1994 of over 120 million pounds. This is divided approximately equally among the UK, continental Europe, and the rest of the world.
At its headquarters in Havant, Hampshire, Kenwood employs 50 people to work on new product development. The group is responsible for designing the entire range of Kenwood household products, from coffee machines to hair dryers.
Over the last few years, increased customer awareness of aesthetics, coupled with the effects of the recession on buying patterns, had caused the product design process at Kenwood to be examined closely.
"Not only is the kitchen appliances industry becoming much more fashion-conscious, but people are buying less than they were. To survive and flourish, we need to produce well-styled products that are clearly differentiated from the competition," said Mike Lapham, engineering and procurement director at Kenwood.
As part of a continuing drive to improve product design, Kenwood's engineers decided about two years ago that their existing computer- aided design (CAD) system - AutoCAD running on Sun workstations - was no longer adequate for their purposes.
"We were starting to feel constrained by our inability to design in 3D, and the drawings we were producing didn't really have enough definition. Some of our products have complex curves, and our inability to define those curves accurately meant that the tool- makers were having to exercise their judgement in interpreting the design. We didn't like this lack of control," said Lapham. "We had to admit that our design process was not efficient enough to ensure our continued competitiveness. We decided to make a clean sweep and install a completely new CAD system which would support a move to concurrent engineering," he continued.
At the time, each product development project incorporated three completely separate design exercises: industrial design (or styling), product definition and tool design. It was Kenwood's aim to integrate these three exercises into a coherent whole, eliminating unnecessary duplication of effort.
The first step was to select a new hardware platform. According
to Lapham, the decision proved to be very straightforward.
"We looked at workstations from all the main manufacturers: Sun,
Silicon Graphics, HP, Digital and IBM. Quite frankly, Silicon
Graphics was head-and-shoulders above the rest as far as graphics
capabilities were concerned, and graphics capabilities were our No.
1 priority," he said.
Silicon Graphics Indigo2 workstations with the Extreme graphics subsystem are able to render 630,000 shaded polygons per second. The workstations feature two built-in Fast SCSI-II channels each delivering up to 10 megabytes per second and a 64-bit system bus for maximum throughput.
Deciding on a software application took Kenwood more time. After producing a short list of possible candidates, the company devised a series of benchmarks and then tested the products against them. "After extensive testing, we opted for SDRC I-DEAS. The other serious competitor was PRO/Engineer, but we felt that SDRC was more suitable for our requirements and the way we work. For example, surfaces are very important to us, and the ability to manipulate and change surfaces without deconstructing the model is particularly well developed in SDRC I-DEAS," commented Lapham.
The design team initially installed two Silicon Graphics Indigo2 workstations, but these have gradually been added to and the total now stands at 17. Three are located at the in-house industrial design office, 14 in product design, and one in Kenwood's Hong Kong office.
The typical sequence of events in the design and manufacture of a new product has changed substantially. Now, both industrial designers and product designers are involved at an early stage, as soon as the analysis and marketing plan has been completed. The influence of the product designers ensures that manufacturing considerations are built into the design from the outset. This in turn minimizes the time and expense associated with reworking designs later on. Furthermore, both groups of designers can work on the same database, rather than relying on models to transfer information.
Kenwood's newest deep-fat fryer has been designed using the Silicon Graphics - SDRC combination. According to Lapham, it is selling well.
"The design process took a year from start to finish. Although
this does not represent a significant time saving over what we used
to achieve before, we were able to do a lot more in terms of
industrial design, product design and model-making. As a result,
we ended up with a product of much higher quality. For example,
we were able to model complex surfaces more accurately, so that the
final product was much more faithful to the original design," he
said.
According to Lapham, another great advantage of the Silicon Graphics system is the capacity to carry out rapid prototyping. Design information is transferred electronically to engineers, and prototypes are manufactured direct from this information. Kenwood no longer has to go through the time-consuming process of constructing cardboard, foam and wooden models of every new product.
As part of its programme of continuously updating its systems, Kenwood is planning to add more Silicon Graphics workstations. "Kenwood is a flexible company. Technology and opportunities change so quickly in some areas that it is difficult and probably counter-productive to make strategic long-term plans. When we find something that is useful and that we believe is going to give us competitive advantage, then we adopt it. This is what we have done with Silicon Graphics and SDRC, and the benefits are very clear," he concluded.
