March 2016

Green offices top three million square metres

Australian offices are taking the lead in tackling climate change with green office floor space now covering three million square metres, or the equivalent footprint of Uluru – the world’s largest rock formation. The CitySwitch Green Office energy-efficiency program represents over 12 per cent of all Australia’s CBD office space and helps companies significantly cut carbon emissions, improve energy efficiency and reduce energy and waste costs. The latest addition to the City of Sydney led national program is Melbourne’s Green Steps consultancy, contributing 1,000 square metres in floor space. Green Steps is a not-for-profit environmental consulting and training provider based at Monash Sustainable Institute offering climate-conscious training to companies. Green Steps has committed to improving their energy efficiency, reducing carbon emissions and improving their recycling rates using the tools available through CitySwitch. Lord Mayor Clover Moore congratulated CitySwitch on reaching the impressive milestone representing a significant commitment from commercial offices to a smarter, greener future. “Around 80 per cent of the emissions from cities come from commercial office buildings so if we’re serious about the war on climate change, that’s the front line,” the Lord Mayor said. “In the past twelve months, CitySwitch members have launched 1,463 sustainability projects, reported an average accredited NABERS rating of 4.1 stars and purchased 296,600 tonnes of carbon credits, detailed in the program’s annual progress report. “Three million square metres is a terrific result for the program – the same size as Uluru which takes three and a half hours to walk around. “These fantastic results are a real credit to Australia’s forward-thinking businesses for recognising climate leadership as a means of producing office efficiencies while making savings to their own bottom line.” The program currently has 730 offices on board with signatories making a commitment to develop a structured pathway to energy efficiency, […]

ALMA sheetmetal software – More profitable nesting for PALFINGER

Every year PALFINGER processes around 20,000 tons of high-tensile steel panels to manufacture loading cranes and other loading and hoisting equipment. Off-cut optimization is therefore a key concern shared by the whole management team in the company. Thanks to Alma’s act/cut software, the sheet metal plates to cut can be automatically nested in half of the time with minimized off-cut. “The fact that Alma is internationally established has been a key criterion when we decided to choose act/cut software… Today, act/cut has become our group-wide nesting standard solution” “The software was not only faster but also almost as efficient as an experienced user… We estimated time savings of 50 percent throughout all plants” The more little parts of different geometry are contained in the nesting orders, the higher the off-cut. When processing big parts, we sometimes have considerably less than 20 percent”. To minimize the off-cut rate orders may be over-nested. If there is still some space left on the panel, the system places additional parts beyond the scope of the order. In addition to that orders may be declared as filler parts, in order to fill panels showing voids where necessary. Alma has programmed these additional functions especially for PALFINGER. Time savings of more than 50 percent The users have become much more efficient thanks to the automatic nesting with act/cut. “Orders, which were formerly manually nested by an operator during his working time, today barely take one third of the operator’s time. We estimated time savings of 50 percent throughout all plants”. Thanks to the time savings, PALFINGER is able to process with the same team much more nesting orders than in the past and accept special tasks, which can’t be automated as easily. The probably most important benefit from the company’s point of view is the stability […]

Autodesk and Siemens sign agreement to to help reduce manufacturers’ costs

AUSTRALIA, Mar. 2, 2016 — Autodesk and Siemens today announced an interoperability agreement aimed at helping manufacturers decrease the costs associated with incompatibility among product development software applications and avoid potential data integrity problems. Through this agreement, Autodesk and Siemens’ product lifecycle management (PLM) software businesses will take steps to significantly improve the interoperability between their companies’ respective software offerings. Today’s agreement brings together two computer-aided design (CAD) software leaders with the common goal of streamlining data sharing and reducing costs in organizations with multi-CAD environments. Today’s manufacturers are under increased pressure to get high quality products to market faster, with increased efficiencies and lower costs to the consumer. Many of these companies operate in environments consisting of various solutions from different CAD software vendors. These multi-CAD environments may exist internally between departments or externally with partners and supply chains. Interoperability among CAD software has therefore emerged as a critical issue for users of design and engineering software, and achieving it is a major challenge for manufacturers. This interoperability agreement announced today aims to decrease the overall effort and costs that are commonly associated with supporting these environments. In particular, interoperability between the offerings from Siemens and Autodesk will significantly improve the many situations where a combination of their software currently exists. Under the terms of the agreement, both companies will share toolkit technology and exchange end-user software applications to build and market interoperable products. “Interoperability is a major challenge for customers across the manufacturing industry, and Autodesk has been working diligently to create an increasingly open environment throughout our technology platforms,” said Lisa Campbell, vice president of Manufacturing Strategy and Marketing at Autodesk. “We understand that our customers use a mix of products in their workflow and providing them with the flexibility they need to get their jobs done […]