Aqualisa Products

With a turnover of more than 40 million and 300 employees, Aqualisa Digital has come a long way
since its beginnings in 1977 and their development of the bi-metallic thermostatic shower valve. Specialising in domestic showers, the company’s long-term strategy is developing new concepts to suit different sectors of the market.

Aqualisa Digital are the world’s leading manufacturer of digital showers and their biggest business
challenge is time to market. To meet this challenge, it was clear that a major upgrade to their
existing 3D CAD (I-deas) system was needed. ‘The NX digital product development solution
from Siemens PLM Software gave us the option of transferring all our legacy CAD data
complete with history, and the support we received from TEAM Engineering was excellent,’ says Tracey Nertney, Senior Design Engineer. ‘Having people who know our situation is reassuring.’

NX is now the software of choice for each new project and Aqualisa has migrated over ten years of CAD data into NX, which they found easy to learn and use. ‘It’s more stable and intuitive,’ explains Nertney. ‘The ease of use cuts the time it takes to design. It is twice as quick to create a drawing, for example, especially with detailed views.’

Glenn Porter, Engineering Project Manager at Aqualisa adds, ‘the design team is also finding
that assemblies are quicker and easier to create in NX; what would have taken 50-60 days can
now take only 30-40 hours!’

The ilux range, which took two years to develop, was the first full line to be produced using NX. According to Porter, it would have taken four months longer on the old system. ‘The increased speed of modeling means we can pursue more ideas in the same amount of time so we can select from a broader spectrum of solutions.

‘Our next product will be better because of the flexibility NX allows, and we hope that the
resulting product will help grow our market share even further.’

Another benefit for Aqualisa’s designers is that NX allows them to bring data over from
previously used packages; and even if the data is not fully compatible, it can still be read. And
with NX design freedom, it can be modified as well. DMX modeling then enables Aqualisa’s
team to accept a design as dumb data and take it forward.

Nertney is pleased with the extra capability that the design team finds in NX. ‘It’s really helpful to have the NX stress wizard,’ he notes. ‘We would have had to purchase this functionality as an extra within our previous system.

‘The NX rendering module has an integral surfacing package and we are looking forward to
working quickly and creatively, leading the market as we go. NX provides just what we need.’

With the aid of NX technology and the support of TEAM Engineering, Aqualisia continue to
break new ground.