Rodenberg Türsysteme AG
Rodenberg door panels enjoy an excellent reputation. One reason for this is that customers can choose their very own front door from a vast and customizable product range. The market leader now handles the complex design adjustments for this process automatically and rule-based—with the help of Tacton Design Automation and experts from Lino GmbH.
Rodenberg Türsysteme AG, based in Porta Westfalica, specializes in highly customized doors that match the shape, functionality, and design of each home and the personal style of its residents. The door panels produced by this East Westphalian company are one-of-a-kind, tailored to customer specifications. Ornaments, glass inserts, and other decorative elements—even futuristic designs by Luigi Colani—can be selected and adapted to personal preferences.
Because Rodenberg’s customers specify door dimensions in increments of tenths of a millimeter, an enormous variety of options arises across all sizes, materials, and finishes. The designs present a particular challenge. For example, a circular window with a 30-centimeter diameter looks completely different on a narrow door than on a wide one. The specific challenge, therefore, is to adapt the designs chosen by the customer to specific dimensions based on aesthetic, functional, and manufacturing considerations.
Until now, Rodenberg had been solving the problem with a great deal of manual CAD work in SolidWorks®. However, for more complex designs, such adjustments took 15 minutes or longer per door, which became nearly impossible to manage as order volumes grew. Furthermore, the more complex the design and the greater the time pressure, the more frequently human errors crept in—errors that were often not noticed until assembly. This resulted in unplanned rework orders and delays.
The solution: an automation solution designed to take over time-consuming routine tasks and relieve the workload on employees. With Tacton Design Automation (TDA), the right solution was quickly found—and with Lino GmbH, the right partner for the journey to productive implementation. A key factor in choosing TDA was that the solution is fully integrated into SolidWorks® and provides users with rule-based decision support. The software uses important relationship knowledge to calculate optimal designs based on the respective dimensions.
For Rodenberg, this is a godsend: custom door models can be generated dynamically in just a few seconds. For complex, higher-priced products in particular, the time savings amount to around 90 percent. In addition, the high degree of automation ensures that Tacton Design Automation processes many orders completely independently—and implements new models even at night. The CAD data generated in this way can also be directly converted into CNC data for the milling machines.
The significantly reduced overall turnaround times are a valuable advantage for the East Westphalian company. Furthermore, manual errors no longer pose a problem, as TDA’s control system virtually eliminates incorrect inputs. The bottom line for Rodenberg is that the investment in Tacton and Lino’s expertise paid for itself after just one year.
