Israel is known for its software prowess in high technology – the “new” tech
where programmers lead the way into a clean, bright future full of new
innovations and inventions. “Old tech,” the kind you find in factories and
assembly plants, isn’t really associated with Israel; the country was
established well after the end of the Industrial Revolution, and factories were
never a major feature of the Israeli workplace.
With all that, though, an
Israeli company is deeply involved in industrial production, developing software
to create molds, dies and machines.
Good software is absolutely necessary
to build plastic-injection molds, for example, which can have up to 5,000 parts,
including pins, screws and plates.
Usually one person designs the
product, but another person – often in another company – designs the molds for
each part. It’s up to the software to make sure that everyone follows the same
design plan; the more precise the design program, the more precise the final
product will come out.
Givat Shmuel-based Cimatron (
cimatron.com)
makes the specialized CAD/CAM software to build those molds.
Cimatron,
indeed, is an anomaly in the Israeli hi-tech world, concentrating on
applications and technology for what is generally thought to be “low-tech”
purposes, Cimatron CEO Dan Haran says. “But it’s not really low-tech because the
design of almost everything today is very sophisticated.”
It’s not
Internet-type hi-tech, but it’s hi-tech in the sense that the design and
execution of almost all manufacturing processes today is very advanced and
sophisticated. Call it “post-industrial,” he says.
Take, for example, a
car dashboard, an area that Cimatron has quite a lot of experience
in.
“There are hundreds of parts that go into making a dashboard, and
they all have to be precisely designed and built, so that they can work
together,” Haran says. “Most of the parts are made out of plastic and metal, and
for each part to work together, you need precise design, and that’s based on the
kind of software we produce.”
There are few businesses that are more
all-encompassing than mold and die design, and Cimatron’s technology is being
used by companies large and small from very diverse backgrounds and in almost
any manufacturing capacity you can imagine.
For example, one company
using Cimatron’s CAD/CAM system is China’s Haier Mould, a subsidiary of the
Haier Group, which controls nearly 35 percent of China’s household appliance
market (imagine how many coffee makers that is!) and boasts a sales network
spanning 31 countries.
With an annual production capacity of 1,200
standard mold sets and capability to build molds over 40 tons, Haier Mould
services global companies such as Ford, Toyota, Volkswagen, Mitsubishi, Honda,
Nissan, Samsung, LG, Canon and Sanyo.
Vaupell, another Cimatron customer,
makes molded products and assemblies for medical, defense, aerospace,
electronics and transportation industries. Here, too, precision is essential;
the parts that US-based Vaupell makes need to be just so – sometimes to the
thousandth of a centimeter – to fulfill engineering and legal
requirements.
UK-based DLS Plastics makes all sorts of plastic caps,
covers and connectors for use in plumbing and water systems.
Once again,
if the connection is off by even a little, things just won’t screw together
properly, resulting in wastewater flooding homes and neighborhoods.
Once
again, its Cimatron to the rescue, with tools that cut down training time and
automate the design process.
You can’t get more industrial than little
plastic connectors to keep water flowing through pipes. That an Israeli company
has been able to compete with the top companies in the world working in CAD/CAM
design for manufacturing is an untold Israeli hi-tech success story. And the
same applies to far more sophisticated products, Haran says.
“Blades and
turbines for many planes, for example, are made out of titanium and other metals
and cannot be made with a die, but are made one at a time,” he says, and
Cimatron has that covered as well.
While China has seemingly become the
“world’s factory,” there are many higher-end items that cannot be made there,
and there is plenty of manufacturing going on in Europe and the US, he says, and
it is in there – among the mold makers, die makers, parts manufacturers or
subcontractors – where Cimatron’s sophisticated software is most
appreciated.
Haran says Cimatron is the seventh-largest company in the
world by sales in this business, which has among its top players venerable
industrial giants such as UGS (recently bought by Siemens), Dessault (Catia) and
PTC.
Combined, these firms sell about $100 million in the
industry.
“We compete very well with the other players in this field,” he
says of Cimatron, which was established in 1982. “Most of our competitors
started around that time, with initial designs being drawn up on PCs.”
It
was the PC, in fact, that turned die and mold making into a science and into a
business, Haran says. And it was Cimatron’s innovations that have made it a
successful Israeli player in a business that just doesn’t seem
“Israeli.”
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