Watlow
Sensors and Pressure Heaters

Since the company's founding in 1922, Watlow has brought its thermal expertise to numerous applications, including semiconductor, plastics processing, food service equipment, life sciences, power generation, aerospace and others. Headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, Watlow is the largest custom designer and manufacturer of industrial heaters, sensors, controllers and software with offices and manufacturing facilities across the country including Illinois, California and Minnesota along with plants in Europe as well as Asia.

With over 1,900 employees, Watlow needed a 3D solid modeling package that would allow them to communicate designs effectively throughout their plants around the world.  Recognizing the importance of choosing a software package which best the company's needs the first time around, Watlow formed a “CAD Team” that was responsible to select a single 3D solid modeling package with which the company could standardize.

“After an extensive evaluation of several packages including Pro/E and Solid Edge, we felt Solidworks offered the best overall functionality for the very diverse product group we deal with as well as being extremely easy to use.  Our critical needs were a robust 3D sketcher, powerful sweeping capabilities as well as sheet metal, and mold tools” Jeff Sauck, Senior Designer at Watlow explains about his experience being on the company's “CAD Team”.

Watlow now uses Solidworks throughout the company for new product development and manufacturing.  “In Batavia in particular we design cast-in heaters, molds, and machined steel parts,” Sauck explains. At the Watlow facility in Richmond, IL, a large variety of thermal sensors are produced. They currently use Solidworks both for new product development as well as for fixture and tooling design.  Watlow also uses Solidworks in conjunction with several major Finite Element Analysis software packages as well as several CNC programs partnered with Solidworks.

According to Sauck, Solidworks has “significantly streamlined” the design process at Watlow.  “Itoffers much more robust, efficient functionality than our previous package; Mechanical Desktop, which was very limited and cumbersome to use.  Not only has the software allowed us to design products faster but it has opened up a huge realm of possibilities for automating our processes through the use of the VERY robust API,” he attests.

Watlow praises the technical support team of Graphics Systems. “Graphics Systems' tech support is second to none.  They have been reliable, professional and extremely competent with service and tech support.” Sauck asserts.  Additionally, Sauck reflects on the reasons behind choosing Graphics Systems as their SolidWorks reseller.  “We chose Graphics Systems over other VARs in the area because they were not pushy, they did everything we asked them to do and more, during our evaluation of the software, and they impressed us with their technical abilities and overall responsiveness to our needs,” Sauck explains.

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