Zhejiang Sanhua Co. Ltd. Chooses SolidWorks Software To Support New Design Processes

China's Largest Control Valve Manufacturer Purchases 170-Plus Seats of CAD, Simulation, and Product Data Management Software.

Beijing – A Chinese company that supplies most of the air conditioning industry’s control valves has purchased SolidWorks® software to shorten its product design cycles and increase quality.

Zhejiang Sanhua Co. Ltd. claims more than a 50 percent share of the world market for air conditioning refrigeration unit control valves. It supplies some of the world’s largest manufacturing companies, including Sanyo, Panasonic, Mitsubishi, Hitachi and Emerson. Sanhua is using 115 seats of SolidWorks CAD, 35 seats of SolidWorks Simulation, and a SolidWorks Enterprise Product Data Management implementation to overhaul its design processes. The SolidWorks implementation is a step toward Sanhua’s transformation from a supplier into a research and development-oriented organization that provides high-value design advice. SolidWorks speeds change management throughout the design and production processes and enables Sanhua engineers to predict how designs will perform as finished products.

“We have short time windows for completing designs, so we must be able to accommodate changes quickly or risk alienating our customers,” said Zhejiang Sanhua’s Design Manager Qian Kang. “SolidWorks CAD makes change management faster because every change our designers make on a model automatically becomes part of the drawings associated with the model. Our previous 2D CAD software couldn’t support that kind of a fast change process.”

SolidWorks solutions will enable Sanhua to work concurrently on designing, testing, prototyping, and production planning, which will shorten time to market. When a customer requests a change, Sanhua engineers modify the SolidWorks model, which automatically propagates the change to all of the drawings made from the model. Prior to SolidWorks, every change had to go through a time-consuming six-step process that required creating new drawings manually. Sanhua also plans to use SolidWorks Simulation to test product performance before production to improve quality and reduce prototyping costs.

Sanhua Holding Group works with SolidWorks authorized reseller Hangzhou Huarui for training and technical support.