gabler

Gabler accelerates the planning of their manufacturing lines using Virtual Reality Solution IC.IDO

Virtual Reality
Heavy Industry & Machinery

IC.IDO is a great tool to communicate technical content with every person involved in the decision-making process, crossing borders internally and externally.

 

Tilo Gabler
CEO of GABLER

 

Story

Today's manufacturing industry faces an important number of challenges, particularly in a global context. To remain competitive in this industry, companies need to design, engineer and build an assembly line to manufacture a product as quickly and efficiently as possible. Thus, the ability to respond immediately to a customer's demand is an indispensable condition to maintain their trust.

GABLER faces this kind of situation daily. They produce machines in-house and develop specific manufacturing lines’ processes adapted to their clients’ needs. To increase their competitive advantage, GABLER decided to supplement their processing solution with ESI's Virtual Reality solution IC.IDO to make faster and more accurate decisions. Indeed, real-time/real-size presentations and fully immersive engineering reviews allow GABLER to offer better and safer solutions to their customers.

“Today we create our 3D data and upload them into IC.IDO to get a better insight of what a production line will look like and how it will be operated. Some of them are over 60 meters long, with complex machines responding to complex processes. With IC.IDO we can check every single corner of the manufacturing line, remove any piece of the machine, replace it by another. Thus, we are able to check manufacturing feasibility and serviceability from the earliest steps of the product lifecycle management,” declares Patrick Gabler, Engineering Project Manager.

Checking accessibility with a virtual manikin
Checking accessibility with a virtual manikin

The common goals of these reviews were to manage risk assessment while ensuring adequate GABLER uses IC.IDO from pre-sales all the way up to delivering their customer's production line. “When a potential client has a very old manufacturing line, all we need to do is show him within IC.IDO how he would benefit from a new generation manufacturing line from GABLER. This is a very powerful demonstration tool,” adds Patrick Gabler.

One of GABLER’s recent projects consisted in engineering a new chewing-gum manufacturing line together with their customer in only two weeks. It was a fixed price project – no changes would be paid for. The only way to meet this two weeks deadline was to ensure the most efficient communication between GABLER's Engineering teams and the client's Food Process Engineers. In order to meet this two weeks deadline, all meetings were held in GABLER’s facility in their IC.IDO virtual project room.

The common goals of these reviews were to manage risk assessment while ensuring adequate safety and hygiene for the workers. GABLER discussed all critical topics with their customer using the IC.IDO Virtual Reality-based system, enhancing collaboration, reducing risks of errors and improving processes quality. Besides reducing development times by 15%, IC.IDO assists GABLER in understanding in detail their clients' supply chain and to serve different industries and organizations. The unprecedented degree of product understanding provided by IC.IDO clearly absorbs decreasing margins in the machinery industry.

 

The benefits:
. Reduce development time by 15%
. Enhance collaboration between GABLER and their client in a very critical context (tight deadline)
. Significantly reduce risk of errors in the production line development process
. Improve the quality of developed processes

About Gabler

GABLER is a small innovative company in the manufacturing industry supplying complete solutions to an international clientele. GABLER headquarter is located in Germany close to Karlsruhe and have 60 employees. They differentiate themselves with expertise in their field: the design, development and building of production lines for chewing and bubble gum, chewy candy, pharmaceutical pellets, dragees and many other products. Their customers include Abbott, Brandt, Ferrero, Hershey, Lindt & Sprüngli, Lotte, Mepha, Mondelez International, Novartis, Perfetti, Reckitt Benckiser, Roche, Südzucker, Storck, Tootsie Roll, Watson Pharmaceutical.