Customer Success Story

Gary Hannah, P.E. -- B/E Aerospace

"When I first got Alibre Design, I tried it out and I was very impressed. For $500 it gives you a lot of solid modeling power. It's not very far off from others that cost ten times more. And it's very easy to use-that's a big plus for Alibre Design."

Gary has used a lot of different CAD applications through the years, dating back to college in the early '80s when he investigated CAD packages for a new campus graphics lab. So, he has seen or used just about everything, he says.

Today, Gary is a senior design engineer for B/E Aerospace in Lenexa, Kansas, the world's leading manufacturer of cabin interior products for commercial passenger aircraft and business/VIP jets. His department includes ten other mechanical engineers, seven designers and five manufacturing engineers. The department provides design, development and sustaining engineering.

He has used the Invite Wizard to share Alibre Design with people in his department, some who don't have solid modeling experience: "I sit down with them for 15 minutes, show them the basics, and then they're off!" To Gary, this experience contrasts sharply with their other CAD system: "It is very difficult and cumbersome, not intuitive. Alibre Design is really intuitive. For anyone who wants to try solid modeling, this is an excellent starting place because it's so easy to learn." Now, Gary also uses Alibre Design for the consulting he does from home.

"To me, the best part about Alibre Design is the repository. It impressed me," he said. "You've got to have some kind of control system. With other packages, you have to buy a data manager separately. A repository system and workflow process only works when everybody has the same system. Our existing system was too expensive for us to buy more seats. Plus, it's so hard to use. So, we keep doing the manual process." Gary described their detailed steps of printing out drawings, taking them down the hall to Document Management where they are scanned and saved as PDFs, then filed in a directory. With wide deployment of Alibre Design at B/E Aerospace, the data management capabilities of the repository would replace these manual steps.

Gary is also impressed with assembly sectioning in Alibre Design. "The sectioning function in Alibre Design is the best I've seen; it's not even comparable to SolidWorks. You section in the assembly, and update the part in the sectioned assembly." Gary thought SolidWorks' sectioning function was only slightly better than others. "SolidWorks just makes a snapshot of the section. To edit the part, you have to exit sectioning, open the part. Then if you want to see it again, you have to section it again. It's not a live representation of the assembly."

According to Gary, Alibre Design is also useful at B/E Aerospace as a "concept development tool. An engineer can use it to document an idea. They can quickly make a model to show to management, then show it to designers who can take the model and have something useable to continue development."

Gary also praised Alibre support. "I can't say enough about Alibre support. Camey and Scott were really helpful. You guys do really good on support, much, much better than my experiences with Pro/E."