ENVENTIVE® CONCEPT

Tolerance Analysis Software
for Fit and Function

Looking to improve mechanical design analysis of variability or overcome the limitations of 1D stackup analysis with spreadsheets?

With Enventive concept, mechanical designers gain immediate insights on the impacts of geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) decisions on a product’s fit for assembly and functionality. Concept helps meet all requirements with the first prototype.

Unlike spreadsheets or any other available tolerance analysis software, you optimize tolerances for both assembly fit and functional requirements, such as for forces, moments, deflections, wear, motion paths, gaps, thermals, and more.

The results: you optimally balance manufacturing costs with quality, avoid disruptive redesigns, cut scrap, and reduce warranty claims.

Using spreadsheets for anything beyond simple 1D stackup analysis requires an impractical level of mathematics involving angles, cosines, sines, and other complex calculations.

This is why mechanical designers and engineers dislike doing stackups.

Instead, they want to focus on the mechanics rather than the mathematics. This is what Enventive Concept is all about.

Whether you’re directly modeling mechanical systems by importing them from CAD or as functional 2D sketches, Concept guides your tolerance analysis by automatically detecting and ranking all stack contributors. Our intuitive geometric and dimensional modeling interface frees engineering teams to focus on critical aspects of a product’s mechanical design. No need for an expert to determine the best balance between cost and quality for a targeted PPM failure rate; Concept takes care of the math for you.

Ready to IMPROVE YOUR TOLERANCE ANALYSIS?

  • Analyze static or kinematic systems
  • Optimize individual or combinations of functional criteria
  • Run Monte Carlo, worst case or RSS tolerance analysis
  • Combine dimensional, geometric and physical variation analysis

Book your free demo to see how Enventive Concept uniquely models and what-if simulates failure rates of requirements, such as for forces, moments, deflections, motions, and gaps, as a function of tolerancing.

“Enventive Concept should be part of any Designer’s or Mechanical Design Engineer’s Toolbox.”

Engineering Leader

with Manufacturer on Fortune Global 500 List

BENEFITS OF TOLERANCE ANALYSIS SOFTWARE FOR ROBUST DESIGN

Enventive Concept cuts the duration of product design cycles by enabling engineering teams to make the right choices on critical nominal values and tolerances early in their design processes.

Enventive Concept follows Design For Six Sigma principles (DFSS). It is often used to solve critical manufacturing issues that were a result of past mistakes. Concept’s value starts during the design phase, before decisions related to the nominal 3D model are made. Thanks to sensitivity information, engineering teams can perform quick design iterations to balance optimization of tolerances and system geometry (nominal values). Engineering teams can create simple yet powerful models to reliably predict product design efficiency, a must at the RFQ level. With 70% of overall project costs resulting from these early design phase decisions, Enventive Concept quickly becomes strategic in reducing costs.

Enventive Concept takes into account all the complex aspects of your design, combined with tolerance and process capabilities from the earliest phases of the design cycle. Enventive Concept’s real-time calculation updates combined with intuitive dimensional and geometric modeling help you reliably determine the best balance between cost and quality for a targeted PPM (defect rate).

“Using Enventive Concept, we went from more than 1000 rejected units per week to zero, saving millions of dollars per year and ensuring a happy OEM customer.”

Director of Engineering

Electrical Device Supplier

Boost your confidence by using Enventive Concept for Simulation Driven Design to demonstrate product robustness to internal and external customers more professionally and at an early stage of the product development process.

With Concept, it’s possible to eliminate late tooling changes that can occur due to poor design choices on nominal values and tolerances.

ENVENTIVE CONCEPT KEY FEATURES

  • Tolerance Analysis:  Cohesive geometric modeling, equation solving, back-solving, and design optimization let you perform analyses in a fraction of the time required for competing products.
  • Conceptual Design:  Enventive Concept models are comprehensive, working representations of a part — not just geometric sketches.
  • Travel and Effort Studies:  Variational force modeling coupled with equation solving, tolerance analysis, and kinematic capabilities give you a powerful tool for travel and effort studies.
  • Kinematic Mechanisms:  Conduct tolerance-in-motion studies by automatically stepping a mechanism through its complete range of motion while concurrently running tolerance analysis to assess variations.
  • Smart Components:  Enventive Concept’s Smart Components™ accumulate engineering knowledge during product design and preserve the knowledge for reuse in future products.
  • Performance Modeling:  Powerful, simultaneous equation solving capabilities combine geometric modeling with mathematical modeling.
  • Design Optimization:  Enventive Concept provides optimization of both critical parameters and tolerances directly from the embedded tolerance analysis

OUR CUSTOMERS

“Enventive’s goal is to improve mechanical design engineering worldwide, and that’s what Enventive Concept delivers to our customers: a unique tool to design for variability that results in better products.”
Yves Le Pottier
Vice President, Enventive

Our customers include those in Aeronautics, Appliances, Automotive, Industrial Equipment, Energy, Medical, Defense, Water Treatment, Automation, and Swiss Watches.

Enventive users include:

  • Fortune 500 companies
  • 50% of the TOP 8 Low and Middle voltage switch-gear industries
  • 50% of the TOP 8 Medical device companies

As market leaders, our customers rely on Enventive Concept to keep an edge over their competitors. Look at what Danfoss or Brano say about us.

All of Enventive Fields

In the automotive industry, Enventive Concept is strategically used by:

  • 50% of the TOP 10 car manufacturers in the world
  • 50% of the TOP 20 automotive suppliers in the world

At Request for Quotation (RFQ) stages for OEM suppliers, Enventive Concept is frequently used to create analyses that validate a design will robustly meet a customer’s requirements.

Learn more about Enventive Concept’s value in the Automotive Industry.

Tolerance-analysis-software-automotive-applications

LEARN MORE

“Using spreadsheets for tolerance analysis comes down to asking mechanical designers and engineers to be mathematicians.”
Kristin Dawson
Enventive Product Manager

When tolerancing, the ultimate goal is to ensure that each stackup remains within the functional limits defined in a Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA). Tolerance analysis is never perfect, and mainly depends on three variables:

  • The tolerance calculation method; for example, Worst Case, RSS, or Monte Carlo.
  • The chain of dimensions, and the ability to properly list and calculate them.
  • The hypothesis-defining parameters we neglect, either due to irrelevance or difficulty to predict; for example, thermal expansion, variational kinematics, or multiple floating holes.

GD&T trainings are key for a good understanding of tolerance analysis principles and tolerance calculation methods. The basics can be communicated using an Excel spreadsheet, but when it comes to geometric product specification (GPS) conveyed in the ISO or ASME standards, it’s obvious that Excel calculations become exponentially complex.

But can we really expect to avoid geometric analysis when standards and customers require proper GD&T tolerancing on all of their 2D drawings or 3D CAD annotations?

Engineering teams know that Excel is only good for low-severity, simple 1D stack analysis. Beyond that, neglecting geometric tolerances becomes an increasing waste of money and probable risk of:

  • Wasting time doing stack analysis to tick boxes in a product development process
  • Making empirical iterations of additional prototypes
  • Causing scrap and engineering changes in manufacturing
  • Experiencing major recalls

There is no single tolerance analysis software on the market today that solves every need. There are major differences between 1D, 2D and 3D tolerance analysis software. At Enventive, we understand that different needs require different solutions, and that’s why we’re expanding our product offerings to provide you with the best solution for your specific mechanical design challenges.

Enventive’s unique variational solver powers all three of our software solutions: Enventive Concept, Enventive 360 (in beta testing) and Enventive 3D&T (in alpha testing). With these three solutions, we support your tolerancing needs with 1D stackup analysis, 2D variation analysis, 3D tolerancing, and enterprise tolerance management. You can also see by yourself how our solutions compare.

We invite you to contact us to let us know what your applications and goals are, and we’ll help steer you in the right direction.

With Excel tolerance stackup analysis, you are often limited to 1D stacks, and many parameters are neglected. Some industries don’t require calculating the impact of GD&T on drawings that rely on general tolerances. In such cases, spreadsheet stack analysis may be sufficient to fulfill FMEA requirements.

The standard process consists of using Creo, CATIA, Siemens, Solidworks or Inventor CAD software for modeling and editions of 2D drawings or making 3D annotations directly on the model. Most often at the end of the design, A spreadsheet, such as Excel, is used for tolerance stack-ups.

Considered by some as Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) software, Enventive Concept can work within this standard process with greater flexibility. Keeping the same CAD-Excel process, you can import your CAD model into Enventive Concept for variational analysis. You will be able to optimize all the dimensional and geometrical tolerances, plus your choice for datums. Smart tolerancing leads to reducing the number of stackup contributors. Fewer contributors results in less need for control in manufacturing, and thus significantly lower overall product costs.

No. The great thing about Enventive Concept is that designers and product engineers use Enventive Concept with a high level of confidence after just a single training. Users create exhaustive variation analyses that accurately reflect their design’s reality and the limits of their assumptions.

Our customers tell us that Enventive Concept is far easier to use than competing software tools. Check out these Case Studies, or book a free demo to see how Enventive Concept Concept actually works.

Yes. Because of its unique solver engine for calculating impacts of variations, Enventive Concept can be considered CAE software. Its functional modeling approach combined with its predictive capabilities makes Enventive Concept the only Variation Analysis Driven Design software of the Simulation Driven Design solutions promoted by Altair and other CAx key players.

Further reading on our tolerance analysis software

Read up on Enventive Concept news

Check out our case studies, including Danfoss for fluid transfer, Brano for automotive, U-Shin for automotive, Wilo for pumps, Schneider Electric for circuit breakers, Idneo for electronic control units, and Bosch for power tools.

Learn about our other products: Enventive 3D&T and Enventive 360


About us | Join us | Contact Us
©2013-2022 Enventive Engineering, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | Legal information | Privacy policy | Cookies | Impressum