Sheet Metal / Sub-Zero Freezer Company

The Challenge

The Sub-Zero Freezer Company is the leading manufacturer of luxury residential refrigeration, freezer, and wine storage units. Founded in 1945, the company led the industry by perfecting the storage of frozen foods at below-zero temperatures and by pioneering built-in refrigeration. Its products, built by hand in the United States, offer the ultimate in performance, reliability, and design in part with the help of SolidWorks 3D mechanical design software.

The Solution
SolidWorks allows Sub-Zero to preserve the intent of the industrial designer while meeting manufacturing needs. With SolidWorks the company can take files right from the industrial designer, make changes quickly and easily to fit its manufacturing operation, and get the engineering data to the manufacturing floor almost immediately. SolidWorks also expedites many development processes. Using SolidWorks, the company can quickly make sheet-metal parts and generate 2D drawings with the assurance that the parts will be right the first time. Sub-Zero can also upgrade a complete series of a product models quickly and easily because of the parametric and configuration management capabilities of SolidWorks. With SolidWorks , it's fast and simple to send models of injection-molded parts out in various formats to vendors to get quotes. And the company also uses SMARTEAM to link its Madison design operations and its Phoenix manufacturing facility. SMARTEAM provides version control and ensures people are working with the correct version, which is especially important in cases where there are up to 56 or 57 revisions of the same Sub-Zero part.

Summary and Metrics:

• Shortened product design through ability to make changes quickly and easily
• Expedited data transition from designer to engineer to manufacturer
• Accelerated development process by making parts and drawings more expeditiously
• Realized ability to upgrade a complete series of product models simply and easily

"With SolidWorks, the speed with which we can turn things around and upgrade even a complete series of our models is incredible."
        John Andrews, Senior Drafter

Case Studies

• Electronics / Garmin International, Inc.
• Heavy equipment / Vermeer Machinery Company
• Design & Engineering / Watershot, Inc.
• Machinery / Hartness International
• Sheet Metal / Sub-Zero Freezer Company
• Consumer Products / Trek Bicycles, Inc.
• Mold Tool Die / JK Mold Design
• Swagelok
• Invacare Corporation
• Werner Ladders
• Simonton Windows
• Whirley Industries