Bailey’s Caravan Increases Production Efficiency by 80 Percent with SOLIDWORKS
The motor home: a neat holiday apartment with the added bonus of mobility. For decades, holidaymakers have sought to hit the road in their home-from-homes for a vacation that epitomises freedom. Caravan experts Bailey help them do just that.
Who is Bailey?
British touring, caravanning and motor home company, Bailey has been in the leisure vehicle trade for over 65 years. A family-run business, Bailey is the longest-running established name in the UK caravan industry. It has a 17 percent share in the motor home market and a mighty impressive third of the caravan market.
How does SOLIDWORKS help Bailey?
Formerly using 2D CAD, the design team at Bailey started to find navigation of its more complex motoring home interiors, increasingly tricky. Naturally, as technology advances, customer expectations of the motor home increase too. For Bailey, that was putting more strain on the design and production of its caravans than ever before.
2D was no longer up to the task. Step forward SOLIDWORKS. Rendering caravan interiors in fully detailed 3D allowed Bailey’s design team to immerse itself in the virtual environment that would become the final design of its product.
Before SOLIDWORKS, the Bailey team needed to build practical prototypes as it went, with regular redesigns. As any manufacturer will know, producing and tweaking real-world prototypes costs money. SOLIDWORKS rendered this costly and labour-intensive method of production, obsolete. Changes could be made right there, swiftly and simply, without having to produce so much as a rivet. On this point alone, Bailey reported a whopping 80 percent increase in efficiency.
Speaking of efficiency, SOLIDWORKS enabled the team to maximise its build during the design process. They were able to make material savings with virtual bench-testing in SOLIDWORKS Simulation: strengthening the build by exploiting the exact space available, without spending more on parts.
SOLIDWORKS also allows Bailey to catalogue all of its materials and parts in one easily accessible 3D CAD database, with no risk of losing files. Instead of drawing up commonly used components from scratch each time, Bailey can simply pull in the pre-designed component from the catalogue and tweak the dimensions if necessary. This further streamlines the design process and has resulted in transformative time savings. Meanwhile, SOLIDWORKS Composer makes it easy to issue step-by-step instructions to the build team, with exploded illustrations taken straight from the software. That ensures mistakes with product assembly – and the resulting costs – are a thing of the past.
Caravan of love…
SOLIDWORKS’ assistance doesn’t stop at the manufacturing side of the build process. Because it is so easy to tweak its designs, Bailey has been able to implement near instant consumer feedback with focus groups, allowing its customer base to assist in the creation of the very vehicles they’ll be buying and enjoying. The team can also feed back into other departments, allowing marketing for example, to get an early heads-up on designs and imaging. The marketing team can use these photorealistic renderings for promotional purposes and advance sales, before the final product has even been built.
What next for Bailey?
Since SOLIDWORKS has climbed on board Bailey’s range of motor homes and caravans, the company has expanded its design team from six to 36. With advances in business as impressive as this, it seems as if its leisure vehicles just keep going up a gear. Great work Bailey!
To find out more about Bailey’s Caravans, be sure to check out the original CadTek post here.
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