Case Studies

Lexmark International, Inc., is a $3.9 billion business providing companies in over 150 countries with a broad range of printing and imaging products, solutions and services that make their customers more productive.

While the company's competitors spend more, on a relative basis, on advertising and marketing, Lexmark has relied more heavily on customer advocacy to underscore its industry througth leadership and success in helping its customers achieve significant cost reductions and efficiency gains. In the new economic reality the importance of peer experiences and opinions as part of the buying cycle has increased significantly.

Lexmark lacked a formalized global reference tool to leverage all of its content in global opportunities. Additionally, there was recognition that an efficent global program could increase productivity by freeing up time for salespeople to sell.

The Challenge

Many tools, Incosistent practices

Lexmark had a marketing resource in each geography with partial responsibility for customer reference activities, each using different tools and processes to build customer reference content and fulfill customer requests. As an example, there was little consistency between a sucess story created in Canada and one create in Australia.

If ever there was an industry in which time compression is the name of the game, it’s Formula 1 Grand Prix motor racing.

Among the teams competing in Formula 1 is Scuderia Toro Rosso, which is owned by the Red Bull Company. And like all other Formula 1 teams, Scuderia Toro Rosso is always looking for new and better ways to compress development and production times and to increase the reliability of its racing cars.

One advantage that the team has over the competition though is the use it makes of Geomagic® Control™(formerly know as Geomagic Qualify®) 3D inspection software at its headquarters in Faenza, Italy. This has reduced the time required to inspect new parts by an average of 30 percent. It has also given Scuderia Toro Rosso the ability to inspect parts that previously could not adequately be inspected within the demanding time frames of Formula 1.

Geomagic Control is advanced computer-aided inspection software that enables fast, easy-to-understand graphical comparisons between 3D CAD models and as-built parts, or between parts from different production runs. It saves time and increases accuracy for first-article and in-process inspection and enables trend analysis, 2D and 3D dimensioning, geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) and automated reporting in a variety of formats, including Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, PDF and VRML/HTML.

Since 1997, when the British took home the land speed record in Richard Noble’s Thrust SSC, it has been the vision of Ed Shadle and Keith Zanghi to bring it back to the USA. Over the last decade that vision has developed into reality with the birth of the North American Eagle (NAE) land speed record vehicle created from the fuselage of a Lockheed F-104 fighter jet and engineered into a 56 foot long jet powered car. With an aim to reach more than 771 miles per hour, this feat of engineering has already tested the ingenuity of the team, but delivered innovations along the way that will impact vehicle design in the future.

As the team moves into high speed testing in 2012, so the team has stepped up its engineering work in integrating more advanced telemetry, high speed parachutes and magnetic anti-lock braking systems, among others. Fund raising, constantly a challenge for the team, has increased, while additional drivers including Valerie Thompson, a motorcycle land speed racer, have joined up and some full-time engineers have been added.

But this increased emphasis to go into high speed testing comes not a moment too soon – competing bids from both Britain and Australia are in progress, with the BloodhoundSSC from Richard Noble set to go into testing at the end of this year. Who will win? With the massive funding for the British team, it might seem inevitable that the North American team is impossibly positioned. But history has repeatedly shown that all the funding in the world can’t replace good engineering - accompanied with a little bit of luck. Maybe the North American Eagle team will have both.

If you’ve ever wondered how much work goes into creating a 3D animation production, the answer is “a lot, a lot” – especially if the work in question relies on the technique known as stop-motion. Stop-motion animation requires animators to capture each individual manipulation of a modeled character to piece together one streamlined movement. For just one second of a facial expression or word, for example, upwards from twelve to twenty-four different changeable faceplates could be required.

The traditional means of achieving stop-motion facial expression animation has been through the hand-crafting of clay models, and has typically been limited to a range of broad expressions with little in the way of subtle expression in-betweens. For this reason, many conventional stop-motion films have had an overall pantomime feel to them. With the introduction of 3D Systems’ full-color ZPrinter® 650 to LAIKA’s 2012 production of ParaNorman, however, animators were able to achieve a final product that was remarkably more life-like than ever before.