Dräger Medical, a subsidiary of Dräger Medical AG & Co. and Siemens Company, manufactures breathing and anesthetic equipment for operating rooms, intensive care units, and ambulances. The engineering staff at the company’s Lubek, Germany, headquarters handles new product designs and ongoing modifications to more than 70 existing products, including ventilators, anesthetic systems, incubators for transporting premature infants, and gas and oxygen piping systems for hospital units. Seventy percent of Dräger’s sales are outside Germany, and 50 percent of its overall sales are to U.S. medical facilities. The company’s products must meet strict U.S. and international regulatory requirements, which means exhaustive testing before they are approved for sale. At the same time, however, Dräger must stay competitive by constantly modifying its products to incorporate new materials and technology, and by getting the new products to market quickly.
The company had a longtime system of testing by building physical prototypes and sending analysis work to outside labs. They made their own machined prototypes, turned, milled, drilled etc. in-house, while prototypes of injection-molded parts were outsourced to agencies for stereolithography and vacuum molding. Although the design process was thorough and accurate, it also was proving to be slow and expensive. Dräger was taking an average of four years to bring a new product to market. Facing intense pressure from competitors, the board of directors ordered the company to cut design time by half.
To meet the BOD order while maintaining quality standards, the engineering department replaced as much physical prototyping as possible by integrating analysis software with their 80 seats of 3D CAD software. The change enables Dräger’s engineers to simulate their designs’ mechanical behavior and physical properties before building time-consuming physical prototypes.
Testing time for the company’s new and redesigned products dropped by an average of 50 percent. Before, the typical design process for a subsystem in an anesthetic system, for example, included eight physical prototypes and outsourcing two or three FEA calculations to verify design parameters. Dräger now averages two prototypes per change to this subsystem, with similar reductions on other subsystem designs. Although time was the main concern, testing costs were also cut — in the redesign of an anesthetic unit, a calculation that previously took an outsource lab three months to complete and cost $26,000, was performed in-house within the software in two days.
The design process overhaul involved adding COSMOSWorks and COSMOSFlowWorks 3D to Dräger’s existing SolidWorks 3D CAD platform. The COSMOS products are tightly integrated with SolidWorks, so that analysis can be performed without leaving the SolidWorks 3D modeling application. The arrangement virtually paid for itself in their first major test. Besides creating prototypes, Drager also used COSMOSWorks to test the effects of making the ventilation plate from plastic rather than aluminum.
“Using COSMOSWorks means that we can run calculations on the various design approaches during the design stage easily and quickly. We can then compare them against one another,” said Karsten Hoffman, a Dräger project leader. “We use the COSMOS products on our designs in much the same way people use their spellcheck when writing a document. It’s a fast, easy way to test our designs that provides much of the accuracy of physical prototyping without the time delays.”
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Dräger Medical, a subsidiary of Dräger Medical AG & Co. and Siemens Company, manufactures breathing and anesthetic equipment for operating rooms, intensive care units, and ambulances. The engineering staff at the company’s Lubek, Germany, headquarters handles new product designs and ongoing modifications to more than 70 existing products, including ventilators, anesthetic systems, incubators for transporting premature infants, and gas and oxygen piping systems for hospital units. Seventy percent of Dräger’s sales are outside Germany, and 50 percent of its overall sales are to U.S. medical facilities. The company’s products must meet strict U.S. and international regulatory requirements, which means exhaustive testing before they are approved for sale. At the same time, however, Dräger must stay competitive by constantly modifying its products to incorporate new materials and technology, and by getting the new products to market quickly. 
The company had a longtime system of testing by building physical prototypes and sending analysis work to outside labs. They made their own machined prototypes, turned, milled, drilled etc. in-house, while prototypes of injection-molded parts were outsourced to agencies for stereolithography and vacuum molding. Although the design process was thorough and accurate, it also was proving to be slow and expensive. Dräger was taking an average of four years to bring a new product to market. Facing intense pressure from competitors, the board of directors ordered the company to cut design time by half. 
Testing time for the company’s new and redesigned products dropped by an average of 50 percent. Before, the typical design process for a subsystem in an anesthetic system, for example, included eight physical prototypes and outsourcing two or three FEA calculations to verify design parameters. Dräger now averages two prototypes per change to this subsystem, with similar reductions on other subsystem designs. Although time was the main concern, testing costs were also cut — in the redesign of an anesthetic unit, a calculation that previously took an outsource lab three months to complete and cost $26,000, was performed in-house within the software in two days.
The design process overhaul involved adding COSMOSWorks and COSMOSFlowWorks 3D to Dräger’s existing SolidWorks 3D CAD platform. The COSMOS products are tightly integrated with SolidWorks, so that analysis can be performed without leaving the SolidWorks 3D modeling application. The arrangement virtually paid for itself in their first major test. Besides creating prototypes, Drager also used COSMOSWorks to test the effects of making the ventilation plate from plastic rather than aluminum.