JL Marine Drops Anchor With Help From SolidWorks

Summer is back at the office in Waltham, MA – we can finally enjoy the warm, sunny outdoors. Some of you may be busy firing up the grill or planning your next fishing adventure on the lake. Even though my fishing experience is short, I remember how hard it was to position the boat without scaring off all of the fish. Anchoring a boat can be a tiresome process – it takes away valuable time that could be used to cast a line and make your first catch.

Luckily, John Oliviero of JL Marine Systems, a SolidWorks customer, has come up with a solution: the Power-Pole shallow water anchor, a breakthrough boat control technology. Over 90 percent of the world’s best tournament anglers use the Power-Pole because of its effectiveness in controlling the boat and approaching cover to enable fishermen to make the perfect cast. Due to the immense success of the anchoring system, JL Marine has expanded to over 1,000 distributors around the world.

To sustain the growth of the company, Oliviero was looking for a tool that would allow him to leverage 3D design, simulation, and visualization technologies that would cut costs, allow him to constantly improve his designs, and accelerate the time-to-market. When he was evaluating different 3D CAD packages, Oliviero fell in love with SolidWorks – and has incorporated SolidWorks Simulation, SolidWorks Enterprise PDM, and SolidWorks Composer into his design workflow.

By implementing the software, JL Marine shortened the design cycle by as much as 50 percent and cut prototyping costs by 60 percent. SolidWorks enabled Oliviero to simulate motion to identify stress points and recognize how the design would reach to the forces of regular usage, integrate different departments in the company into the design process, and create high-quality renderings to support marketing efforts.

For more details on JL Marine, download the complete case study to learn more about how SolidWorks is helping JL Marine design the Power-Pole.

If you would like to learn more about the design tools in SolidWorks, you can request a free SolidWorks trial on our website.

Want to see how SolidWorks can help you win new business and get to market faster? Request an in-person SolidWorks demo today.