Is 2D slowing you down and limiting your ability to create innovative designs? Do you find yourself spending too much time revising designs?  Kevin Bouwman, General Manager of Valley Dairy Farm Automation (VDFA), felt the same way and knew that in order to keep up with the growth of VDFA business, he needed a faster and more efficient way to create his designs with less mistakes.  Let’s take a look at their story.

Founded in 1982 as a dealer for Bou-Matic dairy equipment in northwest Iowa, southeast South Dakota, and southwest Minnesota, Valley Dairy Farm Automation has grown to become a leading manufacturer of customized, innovative dairy farm automation products.

According to Bouwman, “As business grew, designing and manufacturing in 2D became frustrating and limiting,” Bouwman recalls. “Whenever I needed to make a design change, I had to make the change to multiple drawing views, which wasted time. Roughly 40 percent of our products involve sheet metal, and because dairy applications require either stainless or hot-dip galvanized steel, design errors are costly. That’s why I investigated 3D design solutions.”

VDFA chose SOLIDWORKS solutions because of the expansive and supportive online community, short learning curve, and industry-leading sheet metal and weldment design tools. Today, VDFA relies on SOLIDWORKS Premium mechanical design and analysis software to develop its dairy automation systems and recently added SOLIDWORKS Electrical 3D to develop associated electrical systems for its products.

Since standardizing on SOLIDWORKS, VDFA has developed equipment designs that are more innovative, elaborate, and complete, with fewer mistakes and errors. As a result, the company has tripled the number of products that it develops annually. “The move to SOLIDWORKS has allowed us to go from designing a small number of products to support the equipment dealership to offering more than 100 different automation products,” Bouwman says. “With SOLIDWORKS, we can develop products more professionally in terms of fit and function than many global manufacturers, and every year, we add three times as many new products.”

To find out more about the Valley Dairy Farm Automation and how they tripled its production while minimizing design errors with SOLIDWORKS Premium and SOLIDWORKS Electrical 3D, Click Here. Then click the below banner to explore the role agricultural equipment plays in delivering your favorite beers from the farm to your glass.

Josie Morales

Josie connects with SOLIDWORKS users every day to help them share their cool and ground breaking design stories. When not speaking to users, she's binge watching everything.