A Tale of Two CAD Systems

Abstract

Walter Lorenz Surgical Inc., Jacksonville, FL, specializes in the medical devices known as rigid fixation implants. Lorenz Surgical was purchased by Biomet Inc. of Warsaw, Indiana in the year 1992, which resulted in Lorenzo owning two computer-aided design (CAD) systems. In 1996, with the completion of Lorenz Surgical's new manufacturing facility in Jacksonville, all Lorenz operations were transferred back to Florida, including all the manufacturing equipment and its three seats of Unigraphics, which by then were running on Windows NT workstations. The company's management feels it could have stayed with Unigraphics and accomplished its goals, but that adding Solid Edge was a good move. It gave Lorenz flexibility in hiring, allowed it to buy more CAD seats than it could have if it had stayed with Unigraphics alone, and provided a very productive tool. Lorenz's surgical instruments are currently designed exclusively in Solid Edge. Instruments can be modeled in either CAD system, but the job goes faster in Solid Edge. The creators of Solid Edge put a lot of effort into usability, and this shows in how few mouse clicks are needed for common operations. Products that have many standard features, such as a screwdriver consisting of m any cylinders, are very quickly modeled in Solid Edge.