Are you a design or application engineer? We know you’ve been searching for a better conveyor configurator. We shared the same frustration, so we built a “better mousetrap.”

The funniest experience of last week for me wasn’t my daughter’s accidental polar vortex ice dance, my rewatch of Office Space (for real, have you seen it lately?!), or even my nightly late night talk show viewing.

A standard curve is useful in most situations for maneuvering relatively square, relatively small pallets around a curve, but what about short and wide, or long and narrow pallets and loads?

Nobody has time to waste redoing work simply because they had the wrong tools. Integrator design engineers creating CAD solid models and designing conveyor layouts for customers’ automated conveyor systems are no different. But in our industry, it’s common for design engineers to spend hours re-creating models and layouts or adjusting their master assembly when a change is requested or when a customer changes the project scope. Why? Because until Glide-Line, no one had provided a better way to do things.

Automated conveyor system design engineers are consistently telling us one thing: change management is a struggle to do efficiently. It’s why we created a solution: a configurator that allows you to bridge your design in SOLIDWORKS using Excel, save it on your own computer, and make changes to the model in your master assembly instead of re-downloading every time. It’s also smart enough to help you make those changes and serve as a back-up calculator for modifications.

Throughout the entire conveyor design process, changes are inevitably required or requested, updates need implementing, and rework of the master assembly is needed. Using better conveyor design software from Glide-Line, with just a few clicks, you’re able to reconfigure the conveyor applications in your master assembly and have instantly updated models, part numbers, and pricing using an in-context configurator. The best part? It’s free to use.

IMPACT! is the most advanced, yet simplest, automation conveyor design software available. It combines the five elements every conveyor system design integration needs: CAD blocks Snap-to (magnetic) pairing/mating in SOLIDWORKS Firm, pricing Application calculations Part number generation

Does the conveyor portion of your automation project scope ever change? It does?!? (We thought so.) We all know that with fast-moving projects there are a lot of changes in a system scope or design through the life of the project. Reducing conveyor lead time while still accommodating scope changes for automated conveyor systems is a priority for the design engineers we work with. Even seemingly small changes can have big design implications, so minimizing the design time needed for these changes is has a huge impact (almost no pun intended).

We’re taking it a bit far with the Tinder reference, but what IMPACT! does for conveyor solid modeling is what Tinder did for the dating scene: it's added efficiency and specificity.

Designing conveyor applications shouldn’t be a complicated, unpredictable, tedious part of your automation system design process. But for many design engineers, that’s what it’s become. Maybe your applications engineering and/or sales team has already started the process with a concept model, and you’re taking over the fine details to ensure the conveyor applications fit where you need them. Or maybe you were involved from the beginning on the design process, but constant changes to your conveyor design are taking up valuable time and resources you could be dedicating elsewhere.