California Wire Products Corporation (Cal-Wire) is the leading manufacturer of woven wire products on the West Coast of the USA. Ever since the first woven wire fence was manufactured in the late 1800s, woven wire has been used in many applications as an efficient way to secure and protect valuable assets and inventory, providing safety protection and access control for facilities ranging from warehouses, ball parks, military bases, and prisons, to schools, data centers, department stores, storage areas and more. Established in 1948, Cal-Wire specializes in engineered-to-order wire and welded-mesh products that are custom-designed to meet specific customer needs.
According to Engineering Operations Manager Kenny Kuhns, the company formerly used AutoCAD® 2D design software to custom-design products—and even attempted to use Autodesk Inventor® 3D design software to further automate development—before looking for more suitable 2D and 3D design solutions. “We used to use AutoCAD and tried using Inventor, but we hit a brick wall when it came to automating our design process,” Kuhns recalls. “We decided instead to implement the SOLIDWORKS® 3D mechanical design system along with the DriveWorks® rules-based design automation and sales configuration application.”
However, Cal-Wire still needed a cost-effective, efficient 2D design solution for use while the SOLIDWORKS/DriveWorks automation package was being built and configured. “We were facing a substantial outlay to update our AutoCAD licenses,” Kuhns recounts. “For a while, we just didn’t update AutoCAD, but then we began having issues with opening files and losing dimensions and text blocks on drawings. A friend told me about DraftSight® 2D design software, which offered free and low-cost versions that were fully compatible with AutoCAD data, enabling us to address these issues and generate DWG and DXF files at a much lower cost.
“I thought DraftSight would just be a scaled-down version with limited functionality and was pleasantly surprised to learn that DraftSight Professional gave us all the capability of AutoCAD and more at a small fraction of the price,” Kuhns adds. “We immediately purchased four more licenses of DraftSight Professional and have been using it ever since.”
Faster, More Effective Than AutoCAD
Using DraftSight Professional software, Cal-Wire has confirmed that the 2D design solution is easier to use and more cost-effective than AutoCAD, allowing the woven wire manufacturer to reduce the amount of time required to design and manufacture engineered-to-order products. “Wire cages are essentially a low-tech product, and it’s simply faster to custom-design wire cages using 2D instead of 3D tools, unless 3D design is fully automated,” Kuhns explains.
“Until our automated SOLIDWORKS/DriveWorks system goes live, which will let our distributors and sales professionals automatically generate drawings and quotes, and integrate orders in our ERP (enterprise resource planning) system, by entering basic layout information about a product, it’s easier to do these layouts with DraftSight,” Kuhns continues. “I don’t know why anyone would continue working with AutoCAD. DraftSight is a good tool with an extremely effective set of features at a much lower cost. We moved our design library over to DraftSight seamlessly and have moved forward with our work without missing a beat.”