Braking into New Territory

CAD/CAM services facilitate global market expansion

Brembo defined brake calipers for a new car. Notice the left-handed orientation for this caliper — the dark ‘V’ appears to the right of the hydraulic connector with a yellow fitment and green sleeve. The caliper was originally designed in Unigraphics, the OEM’s native system, and the data was supplied in OEM-compliant format.

Best known as a supplier of brakes to international motor sports champions, Brembo S.p.A also makes brakes for high volume automotive OEMs. Most of this business has been with European manufacturers; however, the company currently is strengthening its presence in the North American market. The company established operations in Detroit, but was reluctant to duplicate its own extensive engineering operations, based in Curno, Italy. “Instead of making the large investment that would be needed to establish a local design capability, we are obtaining the engineering services, on an as-needed basis, from CADCAM-E,” said Marc Alexander, manager, North American Passenger Vehicles for Brembo. “They have ably filled our needs for local design, such as converting our design documents to the format required by OEMs, maintaining our AutoWEB mailboxes for file exchanges and providing more detail to OEM drawings so they could be easily used by our engineering staff in Italy. The result is that we have established a local presence with a strong and highly experienced engineering team at a fraction of the cost that would have been required to create our own staff from scratch.”

Moving into higher volume applications
“Two years ago, we decided to increase our presence in the Detroit area to support our existing business and increase our share of the OEM brake market in North America,” Alexander says. “We already were producing the front brake rotors for the Mustang Cobra and the front caliper for the Dodge Viper. These are both high-performance specialty vehicles and we wanted to go after higher volume mainstream applications. Brembo also has other transplant business in North America, including the BMW X-5 and Mercedes M-Class, among others. We put together an office with sales and application engineering personnel but recognized that from time to time we also needed design and engineering support to interface with both the automobile manufacturers and our engineering staff in Italy. We considered hiring a staff here but realized that a very substantial investment would be required to recruit and retain the caliber of highly-experienced engineers that we needed. We also realized that our needs would be highly cyclical and that if we hired a staff there would be times when they were very busy and other times when they would have hardly anything to do. We were in a bit of quandary until we learned about CADCAM-E’s approach of providing highly experienced engineering services on an as-needed basis. We were especially impressed with the fact that the company’s engineers have a considerable amount of experience in working for other Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers.”

CADCAM-E offers both local and offshore engineering services to OEMs, suppliers and engineering software developers with its experience in both mechanical design and CAD/CAM software. As a developer of CAD/CAM, translation software gives it the ability to work with data from any CAD/CAM system and to incorporate seamless data exchange between different systems in all of its products and services. The company can handle projects one at a time or set up an experienced team of engineers that will be dedicated to one client’s projects. 

Providing local engineering support
One of the first cases where the Brembo Detroit office needed engineering support came when one of its OEM customers asked the company to supply engineering documents in a certain format, with the header blocks, font size and other elements to their specifications. “The problem was that our engineers in Italy were used to working to an entirely different format,” Alexander said. “Rather than retrain them, it was much easier for us to simply send the documents to CADCAM-E. They were working for a number of this OEM’s suppliers and knew their format backwards and forwards. They quickly converted our drawings with minimum expense and disruption, while our own engineers in Italy were able to maintain focus on new product development. This job went so smoothly that when a different OEM provided us with data files in an incomplete format, we had no hesitation using CADCAM-E again.”

Brembo created a new version of this brake caliper, with minor modifications, for another OEM that uses CATIA as its design system. Note the reversed orientation. Additionally, the yellow clip had to be modified for this configuration, along with mount flange modifications. The data was supplied to this OEM via AutoWeb.

The geometry was provided by the OEM in the form of tessellated geometry consisting of triangular facets that approximated the actual CAD design. CADCAM-E engineers used this model to reconstruct the original feature-based solid geometry in the CATIA format that Brembo engineers use. Brembo engineers were then able to create their brake system, in vehicle position, and make changes to the model required for manufacturability. After these changes were made, the CATIA model came back to CADCAM-E, where it was converted into the OEM’s CAD system.

Brembo then determined that they needed to install an AutoWeb mailbox in order to securely exchange files with its OEM customers. AutoWeb was designed to provide automotive and aerospace OEMs and trading partners with a highly secure environment to communicate electronically. Subscribers can access the AutoWeb network with a modem, ISDN service, or from several secure VANs, including SAIC’s Advanced Network Exchange. Although AutoWeb employs Internet technology, the system operates independently of the public Internet to improve data security. “It would have taken a considerable proportion of the time and resources of this office to establish and maintain an AutoWeb mailbox,” Alexander said, “even though our usage volume would be quite low in the initial stages. On the other hand, CADCAM-E already was very familiar with the technology, so they were able to set up our mailbox in very little time and keep it running with no additional effort on our part. The cost of using them to operate the mailbox is very low because we don’t have a lot of traffic right now. When we start to use it more intensively, we might consider moving this function inside.”

Alexander notes, “Basically, Brembo is using CADCAM-E as our local design office in the Detroit area. They have provided high-quality engineering services, within a secure and proprietary environment, and improved our ability to support our customers without adding any fixed costs. Most important, they have played a key role in several new OEM contracts that we have been awarded in the past year that are now moving into production.”

—SG

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