Functional GD&T Consulting

We help you capture and clearly communicate engineering intent. This way, you don’t lose engineering intent through detailing and during manufacturing.

These are the steps for capturing engineering intent:

Identify the system’s functional requirements and make sure they’re complete,
Translate the engineering intent to system level datum schemes and feature controls,
Compute system tolerance values,
Distribute system tolerances to part level requirements, and
Determine where more design and analysis is needed.

We ensure your engineering intent is captured clearly and intentionally to reduce costs and improve quality.

Appropriately applied GD&T is the language to document and communicate engineering intent.

Improve Quality and Reduce Costs

Prairiefire helps you use GD&T as a tool to get exactly the parts you need, from either your shop floor or your suppliers.

We help you ensure fit-up and performance without paying for unnecessary precision. Resolve what tolerances and which datums to use.

Our expertise also helps you sustainably fix production quality issues or keep them from happening in the first place.

Guidance or Blitz?

We use a Dimensional Blitz to address an ongoing systemic problem by simultaneously engaging all relevant parties over 2-3 days. We flesh out concepts and create a strong foundation for design and analysis work to fill in the remaining blanks.

If a Dimensional Blitz doesn’t fit with your team’s schedule or existing processes, we can also guide your efforts at your own pace.

Neutral Third Party Support

We’ve all seen GD&T problems get ugly, and everyone starts pointing fingers. Prairiefire can help resolve these situations by providing neutral third-party support. We work with your design team, manufacturing team, and suppliers to objectively analyze an issue, find a mutually agreeable solution, and prevent problems from re-occurring.

What to Expect

How we work with you is dependent on whether we are doing a blitz, providing guidance, or resolving a problem. We prefer to start projects with a site visit so that everyone is on the same page. We can work at your facility or from ours, and customize our services to your needs, by the project or by the hour.

"We hired Prairiefire to analyze a specific region of the unit, as they did the analysis they shared insight in several other areas of the design that we acted on. They have gone beyond the initial scope of the project and interacted at our request with our suppliers in other countries. The solution is yet to be finalized, but their willingness to share insight has most definitely improved the design of our product. Very pleasant and professional firm."

--Herman Viegas, Principal Engineer at Thermo King

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