WAE Corp Reduces Design Cycles by 70 Percent with SOLIDWORKS and 3DEXPERIENCE Works
Every life form needs water, but because only 1% of the water on Earth is usable for drinking and agriculture, clean water presents global and local issues. In India, less than 50% of the population has access to safely managed drinking water.
While bottled water is often seen as the safest drinking water, the plastic used to contain water—from single-use water bottles to 5-gallon bottles atop typical office dispensers—is bad for the environment. WAE Corp. (Water, Air, Energy) provides water purification to provide clean water on a large scale without using plastic with point-of-use water purification systems that offer the same quality as bottled water.
Challenges Abound
When WAE entered the market, 100% of the water industry was relying on plastic that was thrown away and ended up in landfills. The company—located in Noida, India—faced a brutal battle in convincing clients to not use bottled water. It started competing in delivering pure water in the corporate and commercial sectors of the water industry with a “say no to bottled water” campaign.
WAE realized that the most critical differentiator in the market would be a sleek dispenser design, so it started by offering just three [water dispensing] models. While customer reception was positive, the company was designing in 2D, so the team struggled to envision the product and precisely fit its components.
Design cycles were prolonged due to rework issues and lack of consistency between iterations and revisions, and there was no way to interface with their manufacturer during the design stage. Hence, manufacturing issues had to be solved, with great difficulty, downstream.
Powerful Product Development Tools
The company was facing significant problems. “Sometimes our designs weren’t the same,” says Nitin Kumar, Head of Design. “Sometimes we had problems due to revisions. We also had difficulties in production.” Once the company got up and running on SOLIDWORKS® 3D CAD software in 2015, design cycles dramatically improved by 70 to 80 percent. The company grew its product line from three to seventy-two models.
By 2018 WAE realized that communication issues within the organization and its partners were a barrier to growth and customer satisfaction. The company adopted cloud-based 3DEXPERIENCE®Works. Design and manufacturing teams now communicate seamlessly, enabling new designs to get approved faster and more efficiently. In addition, management can monitor progress and quickly provide feedback via the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.
“All of our production teams work with us. Our fabrication teams can easily find out what is going on and what we want,” says Kumar. “We can see how much work is completed on the design team.” With all the company’s data on a single platform, everyone is kept in the loop with automatic notification of changes.
Moving Closer to the Dream
WAE’s point-of-use water purification systems offer the same quality as bottled water but at 70% less cost. “We have about 350 large clients today,” says President Anupam Joshi. “So, I think we have taken millions of [water] bottles out of circulation.” The company is well on the way to achieving its vision of developing products and solutions to protect the environment and to improve the quality of human life without compromising the ability of future generations to improve theirs.
The efficiency and time saved with SOLIDWORKS and 3DEXPERIENCE Works have helped enable WAE to continue to expand its product line beyond commercial point-of-use purification systems. It has designed a point-of-use water tap that will enable the company to reduce the cost of water even further while making access to clean water more straightforward and more affordable for more people while saving the environment from plastic waste.
You can read this case study in its entirety here. If you’d like to learn more about how SOLIDWORKS and 3DEXPERIENCE Works can improve your product development processes, please contact your local reseller.
