Elmich: Accelerating innovation in landscaping and construction with SOLIDWORKS

Challenge: Keep pace with ever-changing demands and need for innovation in the construction sector while ensuring the delivery of high-quality products

Solution: SOLIDWORKS Professional

Benefits:

Accelerated innovation speed and shortened time-to-market
Easier communication of complex design details
Saved costs with enhanced product development capabilities in-house

When developers, contractors, and architects across Asia Pacific need environmentally safe, innovative and cost-effective urban greenery and waterproofing solutions, they turn to Elmich. Established in 1985 and headquartered in Singapore, Elmich has a network of partners in more than 30 countries worldwide who need to work together to innovate and improve their products and processes to meet the ever-changing demands of the industry.

Global growth and its challenges

Until recently, Elmich used 2D design software for their product development needs, requiring them to convert drawings and data from one system to another, making communications across the network time-consuming and cumbersome. In addition, articulating complex design details, such as how the products would be constructed, installed and subsequently serviced, as well as gathering customer feedback remotely was equally challenging.

That’s when business growth, the need to visualize innovative concepts in 3D, and increasing demand for faster delivery times prompted Managing Director of Elmich, Martin Toh to evaluate 3D product development solutions.

There were three requirements for a new software solution:

Accelerate innovation: develop new products and deliver them to the market quickly, while concurrently improving on existing products.
Provide highly customized solutions: being able to easily reconfigure designs based on customer feedback and needs.
Communicate even the most complex design details: present ideas with greater ease and be easily understood by customers, whether for proof-of-concept or in marketing materials.

“We found Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS applications provided a collaborative, productive and streamlined environment for more efficient product design and development,” said Toh.

A business solution by design

By upgrading to 3D CAD with SOLIDWORKS applications, the company gained advanced designing capabilities such as photo-realistic rendering. The company now also has access to a complementary parts library, in addition to productivity tools for enabling centralized file management, design checking and automated cost estimation.

With SOLIDWORKS, Elmich’s engineers could easily cross-collaborate between departments and modify product designs in 3D, allowing them to identify and resolve problems faster and with more accuracy.

Integrated tools like SOLIDWORKS Visualize could also be accessed to seamlessly leverage 3D data for creating photo-realistic images and animations, whilst translating ideas to amazing visuals that engage partners and customers effectively, and impressively. Their customers have also praised improvements in their marketing materials with the use of photorealistic visualizations.

3D Visualisation for Decking with VersiJack® Pedestals

3D Visualisation for MEP® Tray (Modular Extensive Planting System)

Importantly, Elmich wanted the implementation to bring business benefits like optimizing team performance and lifting overall productivity. To this end, it hired new talents to boost in-house proficiency in the software, while investing in up-skilling its existing CAD engineers. The SOLIDWORKS Training and Advanced Skill Building courses offered by SOLIDWORKS partner, SEACAD, proved instrumental in bridging critical knowledge gaps and getting the team up-to-speed with the latest SOLIDWORKS capabilities.

“With SEACAD, technical and subscription support has always been tip-top”, said Toh. “They deserve a pat on the back for a job well done through out these years.”

Driving successful outcomes with greater impact

The decision to upgrade its design and development process has led Elmich towards on-time and on-budget project delivery, garnering greater customer satisfaction. A case-in-point is its innovative and cost-effective VersiTank^® storm water management tank, developed from a project commissioned by a leading Australian realtor, for a new mall development in Singapore.

As the Public Utilities Board of Singapore (PUB) has recently mandated that public squares, malls and building compounds be equipped with a flood prevention system, the project called for Elmich to design a cost-effective stormwater management system that is compliant with various construction and environmental requirements and standards.

Elmich’s engineers envisioned a series of tanks encased in geotextile material that would be easy to install and even easier to maintain. To bring their concept to life, they used SOLIDWORKS to create a 3D virtual model of the proposed tank and deployed it for simulation with Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to stress-test and predict real-world physical behavior. By visualizing the tank concept in 3D and troubleshooting potential problems at the design phase, the team successfully collapsed the product development and construction process from 8 -12 months to just 16 weeks – significantly reducing project costs and resources.