Opel

The Car of the Year 2009 award presented to Opel for the Insignia is the result of the company's continuing focus on quality, innovation and customer interest, while maintaining affordability of the final product.

During the design and development of the Insignia, an important contributor to this was the use of the aesthetica software. It was used from the early concept design stages of the project, enabling the various design, engineering and manufacturing disciplines involved in the project to understand the manufacturing constraints and to agree on gap and flush conditions and manufacturing tolerances as early as possible in the overall design and development process.

This made it possible for the company to achieve the highest possible perceived quality in the final vehicle without negatively impacting its development and manufacturing costs.

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Nissan

The Qashqai marks new high in perceived quality of Nissan vehicles. Nissan's aim was to reduce development costs and lead-times while increasing vehicle build quality. They chose aesthetica to improve their variation control process and help reduce development time and cost to meet their Perceived Quality targets.

aesthetica introduced a new dimension into the overall Nissan design-to-manufacture process, setting and analysing new tolerance targets and analysing previous pre-set targets adopted for other vehicles. This enabled them to compile a realistic portrayal of worst-case tolerance limits and take corrective action before it became a costly brand-threatening reality.

The Perceived Quality group now focuses on the digital model rather than physical models, with variation carried out in parallel with design development and engineering feasibility processes.

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VW Bentley

Bentley Motors, the iconic high performance luxury car manufacturer has implemented aesthetica at its European design and manufacturing Center. It is being used to streamline and improve the process of achieving consistently high perceived quality in the company's vehicles without negatively impacting development timescales and manufacturing costs.

"At Bentley Motors we are constantly seeking ways to improve the design processes required to achieve high quality during manufacturing," explained Jim Shaw, head of Concept Engineering at Bentley Motors. "However there was a reluctance to commit to the targets early in the design process. Hence agreements were only reached after tooling prove-out models were milled and stacked, leading to iterations of the concept surfaces and significant delays int he process".

"aesthetica allows us to visualize the effects of edge conditions and underlying fixing constraints", said Shaw. "Styling, engineering, quality and manufacturing people can therefore appreciate and understand each other's requirements and reach agreement at a much earlier stage in the development process than was the case before. This improves confidence in the concept model and ultimately saves us an enormous amount of time and cost later in the process"

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