Based in Incheon, South Korea, Polyhitech Co Ltd uses VISI (www.visicadcam.com) as its CAD system for designing a variety of plastic injection mould tools for medical, automotive and IT products, and the company says it has slashed surface editing time by up to half.

Polyhitech is a Quick Delivery Mould specialist that uses the QDM manufacturing system in conjunction with 3-D CAD data to shorten delivery times by assembling machined cores and cavities into a standard mould base.

The system, which is used primarily for trial moulds for new-product development, cuts costs by about 40% compared with normal production, while reducing delivery times to between three and eight days.

It is used mainly for prototyping, verifying the mould at the pre-production stage, and small-quantity batch production.

Polyhitech’s mould design manager, Jisung Li, says that customers demand high precision as well as short delivery times, and that is where VISI comes in.

“The main reason we invested in VISI was that our previous CAD system couldn’t fully deliver our customers’ delivery- time needs.

"When we received data from them we needed to edit the surface before starting the mould design process, but we found it difficult to meet deadlines, because we were spending a lot of time editing where surfaces were corrupt or missing, or working on complex geometry that necessitated a high level of ‘graphic performance’.

"We decided that the software was no longer viable for us to meet the standards of mould design and production that we required, so we turned to VISI for a solution.”

Mr Li said he was pleased with the immediate reduction in work time, in particular the 30-50% saving in the time spent on editing surfaces, thanks to the draft analysis function in VISI Analysis.

“This is perhaps the most important tool for our mould design and production process, and I use it after finishing the design, as it is so easy to check if there are any undercut areas.

“Our previous CAD system didn’t fully support that function, so I had to enlarge each part and check them one by one; with VISI, I can quickly find any undercut areas through the draft angle colour display and establish the parting line based on that.”

Polyhitech also works with two other Vero brands in its overall production process: WorkNC for creating the tool-paths for mould machining on CNC mills; and WorkXplore for inter-departmental communication and producing accurate quotes for customers’ mould tools.

Before starting a mould design, WorkXplore reviews the existing CAD data for the product, using annotation and the Analysis function for curvature radii, draft angles and section details, for example.

It is also used for detailed communication between the design team and the customer.

Yong Duk Kim, Polyhitech’s sales director and the main user of WorkXplore, said: “It is so easy to import third-party CAD data of the product design, and open the mould design data from VISI.

“It’s an essential part of the communication process between my design team and the customer.”

In conclusion, Yong Duk Kim says: “The QDM market has been changing rapidly; in particular, the increasing use of ‘smartphones’ has meant that the demand for traditional mobile-phone components is decreasing.

“Driven by these changes, we have made significant investment in our facilities.

"With VISI, WorkNC and WorkXplore, we can offer an advanced technical solution for the QDM industry and have a clear competitive advantage for moulds up to 450mm.

“We are now looking for the software to be an integral part of promoting QDM to new business sectors.”