Centor Australia - Konica Minolta Customer Success Story

Konica Minolta’s 3D Printing Solutions bring affordable prototype design in-house, saving valuable time for Centor

Customer Success Story: Centor Australia

Centor is a multi-award winning designer and manufacturer, with more than 60 years of expertise in the window and door industry.

Because the world is beautiful, everything Centor does is designed to connect people with the world outside. It does this with Centor Integrated Doors – a world-first product that combines a door, screen, shade, and hardware as one, allowing homeowners to create inside-outside living without the compromises.

Summary

“By offering a 3D printer with a managed services component, Konica Minolta is helping to normalise 3D printing and make it a part of everyday work life. The sooner more companies adopt it, the sooner we will start to see more innovation, particularly in the design and manufacturing industries.”

– Michael Smith, senior industrial designer, Centor Australia

The Challenge

The research and development (R&D) arm of Centor is based at its Brisbane Head Office, while the company manufactures its products at locations all around the world. Centor’s R&D team aims to help all parts of the business deliver better products to market faster, meeting customers’ needs more precisely.

Centor has used 3D printing for more than 10 years for a variety of functions, such as developing functional prototypes and creating physical parts that can be used to demonstrate design ideas.

Michael Smith, senior industrial designer, said, “About five years ago we decided to bring some of our 3D printing in-house. While we still outsource when we need functional prototypes, we now create all of our physical demonstration parts in-house.

“In 2015, we needed to replace our existing 3D printer. While we were happy with the make and model we had, we also wanted the 3D printer to include managed print services, which essentially means we can treat it like any other printer on-site.”

The Solution

To address its need to integrate the 3D printer into the rest of the business, Centor chose Konica Minolta to provide a 3D Systems Projet 660 as well as managed print services.

The Projet 660 is an affordable, full-colour 3D printer. It is a valuable solution for design firms, model makers, engineers, manufacturers, and other applications requiring strong, accurate 3D-printed parts. Operation is simple, multiple printing is fast, and labels, logos, and images can be printed in colour for greater realism.

Michael Smith said, “Centor uses the 3D printer a lot, so we needed to make sure the printer and services we chose gave us a strong return on investment.

The Projet 660 met that requirement, and the managed print services from Konica Minolta meant that we didn’t need to be responsible for maintaining and troubleshooting the machine. “I’m surprised at how accustomed we have become to having the 3D printer onsite. Now I don’t know how we did our job without it. It has just become an integral part of our workflow.” Because the Projet 660 is now such a critical part of R&D, Centor needed to make sure that any issues with the printer would be resolved quickly and that downtime would be minimal. Michael Smith said, “This is where Konica Minolta fits in. We knew when we bought the new machine that we wanted to treat it as much as possible like a normal printer. Konica Minolta had the printer we wanted combined with the expertise and service levels we knew we could rely on, making it an obvious choice.”

You may also be interested in