Making a Business of 'Virtual Extrusion'.

* It isn't some industrial version of Toy Story. It's an animated 3-D factory simulation called Preview, developed by Up & Running, a custom installer of extrusion lines based in New Haven, Conn. Developed as a sales tool to present the company's installation services to potential clients, Preview software has blossomed into an engineering service on its own.

Soon after creating Preview in 1995, Up & Running took a challenging installation job for a cup thermoformer in Texas. The company had ordered a turnkey sheet coextrusion and thermoforming line, and wanted to get it in production in a hurry. Up & Running took on the installation job in July and decided to find out if its pretty 3-D presentation graphics could help figure out where all the pipes and wires should go.

They visited the Texas plant several times, loading plant dimensions and utilities into the software. The space for the new 200-ft-long production line was an uncluttered bay, so 3-D simulation only had to locate where utilities should go and allow room for forklifts and overhead cranes. Machinery was coming from three different suppliers, which supplied AutoCAD files of their equipment to be loaded into Preview.

Easy as x-y-z

An x-y-z coordinate system was developed to locate any point in the plant relative to a zero point. Zero was chosen as the midpoint of the axis of the middle roll in the sheet stack.

Simulating the installation ahead of time caught at least one engineering error. "A column supporting the blender platform would have run right through the middle of one of the extruders," U&R president Walter Cornell recalls. There was time to reposition the column before it was built. The customer says that animation saved 10% of the installation cost.

U&R's 3-D simulation has also helped customers who needed to move machines from one plant to another. A blown-film manufacturer near Chicago used Preview to install all utility pipes and ducts before moving a three-layer extrusion line from a plant in Minnesota. "Preview"-ing the new site saved time and money and helped optimize placement of the relocated machines, the customer says.

Float machines in space

Preview is included in the cost of a complete installation, but it is increasingly being used as a separate service to optimize customers' equipment layouts. For example, it showed how to rearrange a plant to create room for a new line and add storage space at a Massachusetts extruder of tubing and film. Animation was used to "float each machine in space to see how the machinery could be placed most efficiently," Cornell says. Then animation rearranged these optimized production units as tightly as possible. "There were other efficiencies they didn't expect," Cornell adds. When the layout became more compact, workers and forklifts were able to get around more efficiently Animation even showed in which order the machines should be moved to disrupt production as little as possible.

Because 3-D animation creates one master plan for a new installation, more engineers can participate without confusion. Customers' plant engineers, machine suppliers, and outside consultants all work from the same plan, allowing more efficient subcontracting, especially for jobs outside the U.S.

On a recent installation of a sheet extrusion line in Mexico, Preview allowed heavy steel frames to be built locally, at lower cost, and still fit the imported machinery perfectly when it arrived. Without Preview, U&R would have spent more to purchase the steel frames in the U.S. and ship them with the machines to be sure of the fit.