IOA Healthcare Furniture Slashes Design Cycle by 50 Percent With thinkdesign 3-D Design Software From Think3

Business Wire, June 14, 2001

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 14, 2001

Company Gets to Market in Record Time with Unique "Kangaroo"

Recliner for Neonatal Intensive Care & Maternity Wards

Mechanical design software upstart think3 today announced that Images of America (IOA) Healthcare Furniture (http://www.ioahealthcarefurniture.com) has standardized on think3's single-environment 3-D solid and surface modeling software, thinkdesign(TM), for designing its family of motion and stationary hospital furniture from concept through manufacturing.

The family-run business is based in the heartland of furniture-making in America, Thomasville, N.C., where the company designs, fabricates and ships a unique line of custom and standard hospital furnishings for acute care settings, patient rooms and lobbies. The firm almost exclusively serves a client base of architects and interior designers, creating aesthetically pleasing, yet highly functional and durable furnishings for new hospital constructions and major renovations. IOA Healthcare's specialty furniture includes recliners for post-surgical patients, maternity wards and premature infant care; convertible furnishings for patient rooms; and modular lobby seating.

IOA Healthcare Makes the Move from "Pencil & Paper" to 3D Design with think3

In mid-2000, IOA Healthcare Furniture began making the transition from strictly a "pencil and paper" operation designing in 3D with thinkdesign.

"For more than 20 years, every single product designed by our company was sketched by hand and handcrafted," explains IOA Healthcare Engineering Manager, Jim Austin. "It wasn't even AutoCAD; it was all drawings. I've got hundreds of paper drawings. We built multiple prototypes before obtaining the `right' design, a time consuming and error prone methodology. There wasn't a lot of precision and when you're dealing in a completely flat 2D world, there are always things that come up that you don't anticipate, which require changes along the way."

Austin brought extensive background in 3D design with him to IOA Healthcare when he joined the company in 1999. "I'd used a hodgepodge of SolidWorks and Pro/E, as well as AutoCAD in the past. I recognized the tremendous benefits we'd get out of working in 3D, so I set out to evaluate the commercial CAD packages on the market to see which one would be best suited to our needs. I became interested in thinkdesign after trying out the company's video game-based learning tutorial, The Monkey Wrench Conspiracy, and a demo CD of thinkdesign.

"After taking a look at SolidWorks, SolidEdge and Inventor, it was immediately apparent that thinkdesign was the one we were going to use. It kind of fit the way we work here, whereas all the others were strictly solid modelers at the time. We liked the creative freedom we get with the surfacing capabilities and it just seemed to have better functionality overall for what we do."

IOA Healthcare Expects to Bring 4X More Products to Market This Year

Within days of using thinkdesign, the IOA Healthcare design team was up and running, and highly productive in 3D, according to Austin. "It couldn't have been easier," he says, "nothing like any of my previous experience with CAD products, which were all very difficult to learn and use. Since the president of the company still likes to sketch, I have a large white board in my office where he can sketch and I can enter the ideas straight into the computer, capturing what he wants right from the beginning."

Over the past six months, IOA Healthcare has already produced more than 10 products using thinkdesign, which is more than double the number of designs completed in the same timeframe last year. Says Austin, "At this rate, we're on track to bring more than four times the number of products to market this year than we did last year.

Firm Slashes Design Time by 50% on First Project: "Kangaroo" Neonatal Recliner

The Kangaroo recliner for neonatal intensive care was the first project IOA Healthcare tackled using thinkdesign. A neonatal intensive care unit nurse approached the company with a request to design a special recliner for what's known as `kangaroo care' in the medical community. This form of treatment for premature babies was first developed in 1983 in Bogota, Colombia, which had a 70 percent mortality rate at the time. What they discovered through experimentation was that having parents and caregivers hold the tiny patients all day, rather than keeping them in incubators, drastically reduced the mortality rate to 30 percent. This technique has since become common practice throughout the world, says Austin

"So, our design challenge for the Kangaroo chair was to create a chair that you could move in and be comfortable in for very long periods of time," he explains. "Out of the hundreds of designs that we've produced over the years, we knew that none of them would be quite right for this particular product. We knew we couldn't use just traditional construction and that it couldn't be a traditional recliner."