How SOLIDWORKS is Transforming U.K. Homes

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When does a house become a home? Origin is the business to ask. They transform interior spaces with bi-folding glass doors for style-savvy customers. But the most important door was the one SOLIDWORKS opened, leading Origin to more creativity, less cost and huge business growth.

What started in 2002 as a three-man band has grown into a business with over 200 employees and operations across Europe, the U.S. and the Middle East. Origin is so good at what they do that it has become the leading U.K. business in their field, providing style, sophistication and security in one service.

For style-conscious homeowners and forward-thinking architects, Origin provides an invaluable service. The company designs and manufactures – from scratch – beautifully designed bi-folding doors and windows, turning plain old external walls into stunning glass facades that can be fully retracted.

How Does SOLIDWORKS Help?

Origin insists on designing and manufacturing everything in-house, which is part of the reason it can guarantee high-quality, while keeping costs in check. As this video from our friends at Cadtek shows, SOLIDWORKS has become nothing less than integral to the way Origin works.

Exceptional Creative Freedom

The flexibility of SOLIDWORKS means that if you can think it, it can be designed. That’s crucial to a company like Origin, who trade off its boundary-smashing creativity. SOLIDWORKS allows Origin’s design team to share ideas, compare design iterations and tweak their model until it’s just right.

SOLIDWORKS does pragmatism too. Obviously external doors have to hold their own when it comes to thermal efficiency. With SOLIDWORKS Origin can integrate essential product components, such as thermal breaks, into their designs. This allows the business to get the product as perfect as possible before they begin prototyping, which is ideal for keeping costs down.

Origin is confident in the quality of its products. That’s why it offers every customer a 20-year guarantee. The load-testing and mechanical simulations that can be performed in SOLIDWORKS make it easy for Origin to gauge how a product is going to perform before it’s even left the design suite. That means they can be confident of a product’s operational performance before the prototype stage: less prototyping, less testing, less cost.

Seamless Speed

You know what they say: time is money. Origin manufactures in excess of 10,000 doors per year, each one designed from scratch. SOLIDWORKS makes the entire design and manufacturing process seamless. Design is faster. There’s no need for multiple prototypes, and the manufacturing department can create products directly from SOLIDWORKS models.

It’s made it possible for Origin to offer a unique customer promise – “your lead time, not ours” – which allows the customer to choose when their product is ready, whether they want it turned around within one month, one week or one day.

SOLIDWORKS has enabled Origin to produce genuinely innovative designs for its customers. Best of all it has improved productivity while keeping costs in check. Has 3D CAD been essential to Origin’s success? That’s an open and shut thing.

Thanks to the team at Cadtek for supplying this case study. Take a look at their website for more SolidWorks case studies and inspiration.

SOLIDWORKS UK

SOLIDWORKS UK

Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corp. offers complete 3D software tools that let you create, simulate, publish, and manage your data. SolidWorks products are easy to learn and use, and work together to help you design products better, faster, and more cost-effectively. The SolidWorks focus on ease-of-use allows more engineers, designers and other technology professionals than ever before to take advantage of 3D in bringing their designs to life.