OREANDA-NEWS. October 24, 2011. Fujitsu today announced that Alps Electric Co., Ltd.'s MMP Division, in charge of developing assembly equipment and other manufacturing equipment, has unified its design environment for mechanical and control systems, and recently built a new development environment based on Fujitsu's iCAD7 three-dimensional CAD system to raise design efficiency and product quality.

For the manufacturing equipment in which specification and concept plans are implemented, the new system automates process layout work and the production of operation timing charts. This enables a significant reduction in design work, from layout planning to verification of operation timing and the generation of drawings, resulting in improvements to the design quality of manufacturing equipment, as well as faster development speeds.

Alps Electric plans to deploy the new design environment in all of its manufacturing locations, including those based outside Japan. To the extent possible, the company plans to perform preliminary verification using the 3D data for operational verification and installation adjustment work in its control programs that are currently performed using actual equipment, thereby compressing the time required for the complete set-up, from assembly to installation, of its manufacturing equipment. Alps Electric estimates that it will reduce overall development times for its manufacturing equipment, from design to set-up, by 50%, thereby enhancing its competitive-edge.

Fujitsu plans to introduce the design environment at the iCAD Conference 2011 it is sponsoring in November, at venues in Tokyo (Shinagawa), Osaka (Umeda), and Aichi (Nagoya).