Eveready Manufacturing, established in 1978, specialise in plastic processing. Their main business includes plastic compounding and recycling as well as supplying both commodity and engineering plastic resins worldwide. They have a complete range of facilities to recycle plastic wastes of all forms, sizes and shapes into resins. One of their latest developments is the automated plastic sorting system, which uses Near Infrared sensors to identify different types of plastics and colours. The Near Infrared sensors are extremely reliable and are able to detect all types of plastics. This overcomes the problems of the conventional manual sorting methods which are labour intensive, slow, inaccurate and inconsistent.
Eveready have an in-house R&D team for developing the Automated Plastic Sorting system. According to Lim Sien Koon, Project Manager, the challenge that the team faced was that they had often spent a lot time and money during the design phase due to inefficiencies. Sometimes, the team only realised the design faults after they had constructed the prototype. Design errors and cost overruns were impacting time to market. To address the challenges faced, Eveready Manufacturing needed to shorten the design cycle, cut down on the design time and errors, and increase the cost efficiency.
After discussion with IMAGINiT Technologies , Eveready Manufacturing decided to adopt Autodesk Inventor Suite to improve their design and development processes. Autodesk Inventor Suite allows the team to visualise, simulate, and analyse how a design will work under real-world conditions before a product or part is ever built. With Autodesk Inventor software, the team can check the design and engineering data as they work, minimise the need for physical prototypes, and reduce costly engineering changes discovered after the design has been sent to manufacturing.
Eveready Manufacturing are happy with the outcome. Koon has observed that the Inventor software not only offers them more flexibility in their design, but also provides the team a whole new perspective towards designing. Most importantly, it gives them a much clearer idea of how the final product would have looked without even constructing the actual prototype. By rapidly building digital prototypes that validate a design’s function, the team can detect errors before the product or part is ever built.
Koon comments that the implementation process was smooth and attributes this success to the quality of the IMAGINiT Technologies’ training, competent technical staff and responsive technical support provided. The training was comprehensive and well covered. The training material/handouts given were also very useful which could also be used as a reference book.