Gearing up for the future
Published Mon 21 Apr 2008
Al Dean visits UK-based Westfield Sportscars to find out how Inventor is helping the company compete and innovate in the world of sports car production.
The sports car market has always been healthy. But more recently sales have been growing at a vigorous rate helped by nimble manufacturers providing greater thrills for less cash.
Westfield Sportscars is at the vanguard of this movement. Founded in 1982, by grand prix competitor and engineer, Chris Smith, the company designs and builds replica racing cars. Its provenance was Smith’s well-oiled home garage at Westfield House, Armitage, where he first painstakingly reproduced one of his all-time favourite race cars, the 1956 Lotus XI Le Mans car.
Such was the accuracy and beauty of the design that Smith was inundated with requests from enthusiasts wanting to get in on the action. By the following Easter, Westfield Sportscars held pole position in the niche replica market. From the outset Chris and his business partner and wife, Eileen, recognised the importance of constantly reinvesting in product development. The company expanded rapidly, introducing a new model the equally well-received Westfield 7SE.
In 1991, Westfield relocated to the impressive factory and office block in Kingswinford where it is still housed today. It was here that the incredible V8-powered SEIGHT first caused rumblings on the tarmac. With monster power and an incredible 0-60mph time of 3.6 seconds, it is Westfield’s fastest machine to date and received critical acclaim from the motoring press.
Technology & the future
Westfield’s design team currently runs a single seat of Inventor but is continually looking to improve how they utilize the CAD tools available to them. Analysis and scanning forms a part of those ambitions and Westfield anticipates it will most likely acquire more than one CAD seat to help with this process.
The company’s analysis requirements are currently taken care of by a thirdparty, who is typically sent an IGES file of a chassis or part designed in Inventor for analysis. The results are then fed back to Westfield, the part is refined in Inventor and an IGES file sent back for analysis until an optimum design is found. “We currently haven’t got to the point of doing analysis in-house using Inventor,” explains Ross Dickson, CAD design engineer, Westfield, “But once we have a fuller library of components and assemblies modelled we’ll begin to look at that.
“We are also in the process of acquiring a scanner as we have to get this done by a 3rd party at the moment, mostly for capturing engine and transmission parts,” adds Dickson.
Westfield currently runs Inventor on a Dell Precision 670 workstation with Windows XP Pro SP2, 3.4GHz Intel Xeon processor, 3GB RAM, and an Nvidia Quadro FX 540 graphics card.
Managing change
In December 2006 ownership of Westfield Sportscars transferred to Potenza Sports Cars. The new management team is continuing to expand into new markets, as well as modernising processes to meet more stringent legislation, such as Euro IV compliance.
‘There are a number of hurdles in front of us,’ says Julian Turner, managing director at Westfield. ‘There are many things coming up now, such as Euro IV emissions tests, the requirement for homologated vehicles. Vehicles need to have passed these tests and we’re only allowed to sell into those countries.’
These new legislative requirements place a huge burden then linked into the company’s manufacturing software (Sage 200 www.sage.com) to create accurate and up to date Bills of Materials for each customer’s vehicle.
Raising the bar for suppliers
Westfield has 200 suppliers, 199 of which are UK based; with one Japanese tyre manufacturer. This means the company is highly dependent on the local economy. Using 3D at the core of Westfield’s business has helped dramatically.
It can now email suppliers and receive a quote back the same day. ‘Before Inventor, we had to create a unique drawing for each job, send it away and wait a week for it to come back – it was destroying the business,’ Turner says.
Many of the company’s suppliers still use mass production methods and so have had little or no experience of CAD drawings. To help change that, Turner’s team is helping to educate its suppliers about the latest technical products, raising the quality of service and encouraging the suppliers to communicate electronically.
The benefits of using 3D data recently became even more apparent. ‘We had a problem with an exhaust supplier,’ says Turner. ‘We didn’t have any historical data, so we got somebody’s car in, created a 3D model of the exhaust system and sent it to a supplier. Now we’ve got that data stored digitally we just send our suppliers an electronic RFQ and get a price back same day. As a business that’s extremely powerful.’
Remanufacturing and rework has been drastically reduced through the use of digital prototype data. ‘We used to receive components, which had to be remanufactured to fit on the car,’ says Turner. ‘For example, engines used to come in dressed, with the alternator on or the fl ywheel, and we had to strip it all off – it was part of the cost, we were paying to assemble the engine. Now we can detail exactly what we want and how.’
About Westfield Sportscars
Westfield Sportscars is one of the UK’s leading hand built sports car manufacturers that still is British owned and family run. The company has sold over 8,500 cars worldwide since 1983 and currently produces over 400 cars a year for driving enthusiasts the world over.
All Westfield Sportscars are available in both factory built and self build form. A variety of packages are on offer from a basic starter kit through to a complete kit of all new parts which can be assembled by the enthusiast or by Westfield at the factory.
The future?
Since 1983, Westfield has sold over 8,500 cars worldwide, and currently produces over 400 cars a year for driving enthusiasts. But the company is constantly under pressure to produce more cars – a challenge that is being aided by the roll-out of Autodesk Inventor. ‘Previously we would build a number of chassis prototypes, try them all, test them and then destroy them,’ says Turner. ‘Using Inventor to build a digital prototype to check for design clashes and using it for more complex analyses, such as emissions testing, will both encourage innovation and help to raise productivity as it will enable us to cut physical prototypes to just one or two.’
In an age of manufacturing imports Westfield is proud to boast high quality British craftsmanship in every aspect of production.
What has changed, however, is the way in which those high-quality products are produced and the time it takes to make them. Turner predicts that cutting the number of physical prototypes and using the Inventor digital prototype for testing and analysis will signifi cantly cut time to market. ‘I can imagine our lead time is going to halve by the time we’ve sorted out the rest of our processes,’ says Turner. That should keep Westfield in pole position for some time to come.
