Wood Stone
Wood Stone Corporation is North America's leading manufacturer of stone-hearth cooking equipment. The cornerstone of the company's product line is a wood-fired restaurant oven that has been adopted by many of the country's hottest chefs, including Wolfgang Puck.
Hot ovens
Wood Stone differs from other domestic stone-hearth oven suppliers, who primarily assemble imported components. Wood Stone designs and builds its own ovens, going as far as formulating the high-temperature ceramics used inside them.
For many years, engineers at Wood Stone created 2D drawings of oven components using AutoCAD. They sent these drawings to suppliers who fabricated parts, which were then brought back to Wood Stone and assembled. There were several drawbacks to the 2D approach. One, it was difficult to envision how parts fit together.
Errors – such as fastener holes not lining up in multiple pieces of sheet metal – might not be found until assembly, causing delays while new parts were made and adding to development costs. Another drawback was how difficult it was to document sheet metal precisely. “Taking into account how metal bends is always a problem in 2D,” explains Jeffrey Wilkins, an engineer at Wood Stone. “You might want a bend ‘up’ and you indicate a line on the drawing, but it’s not really clear how much and exactly where the metal deforms in the bend.” Finally, uses for 2D drawings were limited. They weren’t attractive enough for the company’s website, and many customers couldn’t understand drawings well enough to rely on them during installation.
Cool-headed selection process
Several years ago, Wood Stone’s president gave the go-ahead to the engineering department to upgrade to solid modeling. The company evaluated three programs, Solid Edge® software, SolidWorks and Inventor. Inventor was ruled out because its sheet metal and rendering capabilities at that time were insufficient for Wood Stone’s needs. In addition, that version of the program had difficulty opening AutoCAD drawings. After a head-to-head comparison of Solid Edge and SolidWorks, Wood Stone chose Solid Edge in part because its sheet metal functionality was superior. “Solid Edge’s sheet metal modeling process is more intuitive, making use of tools and commands similar to those used in a sheet metal shop,” says Wilkins. Other advantages of Solid Edge were built-in rendering, which meant Wood Stone wouldn’t have to buy additional software, and Solid Edge fast and intuitive drafting environment.
Benefits for engineering
Solid Edge assembly modeling capability lets Wood Stone engineers visualize an oven with all its interconnected parts, including fasteners. “This has allowed us to catch a lot of errors before parts are manufactured,” Wilkins says. “We can rotate the model or zoom in to see areas of concern. By catching problems at this stage, we save time and money.” The intuitive nature of Solid Edge, exemplified by its sheet metal modeling and drafting environments, has greatly reduced the time needed to design a new oven. Wood Stone estimates that design time has been cut in half compared to working in 2D.
Benefits for the rest of the company
A faster design cycle helps Wood Stone win custom orders. Recently a request came in from a trade show for a six-foot oven with doors 180 degrees opposite each other. The restaurant needed the oven in eight weeks. Wood Stone didn’t have such an oven but was able to design and build one by the delivery date. In another situation, a restaurant chain expressed an interest but only if the ovens could be customized with its style and logo. Working from simple sketches, Wilkins created renderings of the desired look in Solid Edge. After some minor revisions, the company placed the order. “I don’t know if they would have made the decision based on 2D drawings,” he says.
Nearly one-quarter of the CAD effort now goes into sales and marketing, according to Wilkins. For example, Solid Edge renderings of ovens are brought into PhotoShop where flames are added to create pictures for the company’s website. Solid Edge models are also used for installation and service diagrams. Wilkins once saved the company the cost of creating a physical kitchen by combining a Solid Edge model of an oven with a photo of a kitchen. “In one day I was able to create what would take many days of planning and set-building necessary to take an actual promotional photograph,” says Wilkins. “This can be done before the product is even finished so marketing does not have to wait for production.”
Wood Stone differs from other domestic stone-hearth oven suppliers, who primarily assemble imported components. Wood Stone designs and builds its own ovens, going as far as formulating the high-temperature ceramics used inside them.
For many years, engineers at Wood Stone created 2D drawings of oven components using AutoCAD. They sent these drawings to suppliers who fabricated parts, which were then brought back to Wood Stone and assembled. There were several drawbacks to the 2D approach. One, it was difficult to envision how parts fit together.
Errors – such as fastener holes not lining up in multiple pieces of sheet metal – might not be found until assembly, causing delays while new parts were made and adding to development costs. Another drawback was how difficult it was to document sheet metal precisely. “Taking into account how metal bends is always a problem in 2D,” explains Jeffrey Wilkins, an engineer at Wood Stone. “You might want a bend ‘up’ and you indicate a line on the drawing, but it’s not really clear how much and exactly where the metal deforms in the bend.” Finally, uses for 2D drawings were limited. They weren’t attractive enough for the company’s website, and many customers couldn’t understand drawings well enough to rely on them during installation.
Cool-headed selection process
Several years ago, Wood Stone’s president gave the go-ahead to the engineering department to upgrade to solid modeling. The company evaluated three programs, Solid Edge® software, SolidWorks and Inventor. Inventor was ruled out because its sheet metal and rendering capabilities at that time were insufficient for Wood Stone’s needs. In addition, that version of the program had difficulty opening AutoCAD drawings. After a head-to-head comparison of Solid Edge and SolidWorks, Wood Stone chose Solid Edge in part because its sheet metal functionality was superior. “Solid Edge’s sheet metal modeling process is more intuitive, making use of tools and commands similar to those used in a sheet metal shop,” says Wilkins. Other advantages of Solid Edge were built-in rendering, which meant Wood Stone wouldn’t have to buy additional software, and Solid Edge fast and intuitive drafting environment.
Benefits for engineering
Solid Edge assembly modeling capability lets Wood Stone engineers visualize an oven with all its interconnected parts, including fasteners. “This has allowed us to catch a lot of errors before parts are manufactured,” Wilkins says. “We can rotate the model or zoom in to see areas of concern. By catching problems at this stage, we save time and money.” The intuitive nature of Solid Edge, exemplified by its sheet metal modeling and drafting environments, has greatly reduced the time needed to design a new oven. Wood Stone estimates that design time has been cut in half compared to working in 2D.
Benefits for the rest of the company
A faster design cycle helps Wood Stone win custom orders. Recently a request came in from a trade show for a six-foot oven with doors 180 degrees opposite each other. The restaurant needed the oven in eight weeks. Wood Stone didn’t have such an oven but was able to design and build one by the delivery date. In another situation, a restaurant chain expressed an interest but only if the ovens could be customized with its style and logo. Working from simple sketches, Wilkins created renderings of the desired look in Solid Edge. After some minor revisions, the company placed the order. “I don’t know if they would have made the decision based on 2D drawings,” he says.
Nearly one-quarter of the CAD effort now goes into sales and marketing, according to Wilkins. For example, Solid Edge renderings of ovens are brought into PhotoShop where flames are added to create pictures for the company’s website. Solid Edge models are also used for installation and service diagrams. Wilkins once saved the company the cost of creating a physical kitchen by combining a Solid Edge model of an oven with a photo of a kitchen. “In one day I was able to create what would take many days of planning and set-building necessary to take an actual promotional photograph,” says Wilkins. “This can be done before the product is even finished so marketing does not have to wait for production.”
