BMW chooses FormingSuite's Process Planner

Forming Technologies Inc. (FTI) announced that Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (BMW) Cost Engineering Group from Munich, Germany, has chosen Formingsuite’s Process Planner. Formingsuite Process Planner, unlike traditional bill of material or historical based products on the market today, is a product geometry feature based and process content driven system to determine the process layout and compare the cost for a progressive or transfer die.

“BMW’s Cost Engineering Group has decided to use the FormingSuite ProcessPlanner developed by Forming Technologies Inc. (FTI). This solution detects very fast and reliable all the process related forming features and uses these to provide a first process plan. This process plan is the basis for cost estimation. The easy to use workflow and the ability to edit and adjust the process plan convinced us,” states BMW Cost Engineering Group.

“Process Planner will help the end users at BMW create a process flow, predict the number of operations, the die load, press size, tonnage, energy and selection, as well as the cost of the die and the severity index to reflect the complexity of the operations for both progressive and transfer dies” said Michael Gallagher, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, FTI. “Our unique feature based recognition system will automatically indentify the product features and because the system is associative and regenerative, the end user can quickly run scenarios to determine the best layout with the best cost.”

Formingsuite’s Process Planner is designed to be an open system that will, when incorporated in front of most existing bill of material type systems, enhance and improve the overall accuracy and ease of use while mitigating risk for the end users.