Creaform is expanding its engineering division. Anytime a company expands rather than contracts, the reason generally is that it’s seeing an increase in demand of its products and services. Creaform offers portable 3D measurement products and a variety of engineering services.
The company recently made the announcement in a press release, saying that the demand for its expertise in design, engineering and simulation has shot up in the last 15 months, leading to the creation of 50 new positions, expanding its total workforce by 42 percent.
The growth in revenue and market share is consistent with Creaform’s performance over the last few years. This year, it expanded locations, adding a Creaform operation in India and opening a prototyping facility near Montreal. Moreover, Creaform Engineering is continually investing in new value-added skills for its offerings, such as automation, electronics and software development.
Creaform Engineering offers a huge set of expertise to clients in the hopes of satisfying every customer’s needs for level of experience and varying skill sets. Every customer has a different product vision, different specifications and an array of compliance standards that are all constrained by varying budgets and bottom-line considerations. Each project is matched with some of Creaform’s over 175 engineers and technicians, but it is still looking to hire more mechanical and electrical technicians and engineers, finite element analysis (FEA) engineers and automation experts.
The company also added creaform-engineering.com, a new Web site where you can see examples of how its end-to-end engineering services have been used to serve customers in different sectors and industries.
From numerical simulation (FEA/computational fluid dynamics [CFD]), product development, industrial design and advanced surface modeling, Creaform Engineering serves customers in the transport, recreational products, oil and gas, and consumer product sectors.
One of the examples showed an interesting project of designing and analyzing a new drill pipe loader for Rotobec. Based out of Canada, Rotobec manufactures material handling equipment using hydraulic rotation system technology. The company’s name emphasizes the introduction and importance of the rotating hydraulic system to the forestry industry. It employed Creaform Engineering to help it design and validate the structure of a new drill pipe loader to fit within specified parameters of the mining industry.
Creaform helped Rotobec by providing project management and mechanical designers to help design structures and mechanisms. It also provided 3D and 2D CAD drawings, including general assembly drawings, helped with operator lift capacity analysis and performed static linear and nonlinear analysis as well as factor-of-safety calculations for metallic and interface joints like fasteners and pins.