If you’ve ever eaten corn flakes or planted a seed, chances are A.T. Ferrell Co. Inc. has touched your life.

A leader serving agricultural, food and industrial markets, A.T. Ferrell has been designing and building equipment used to process, condition and convey grains, feeds, seeds and other bulk and powder materials for 140 years. The products its three divisions make are used and trusted by feed mills, farm operators and food, cereal and oilseed processors worldwide. Many customers have relied on their equipment and expertise for decades to maximize their profits. As a result, A.T. Ferrell needs to be agile and responsive, continually innovating their designs to deliver superior results and performance for their customers.

The company has moved beyond 3D to digital prototyping, enabling it to design, visualize and simulate the real-world performance of its products before cutting a single piece of steel. Autodesk Inventor software has helped A.T. Ferrell to:

• Better support its customers
• Help lower costs and increase innovation
• Avoid costly mistakes, speeding product development time
• Use a single digital prototype for design, sales, marketing and manufacturing
• Reduce reliance on expensive physical prototyping

The challenge
To meet each customer’s requirements, A.T. Ferrell configures its equipment to order, to meet customer needs, now and in the future.

“Even though we have common chassis concepts, there are 15 to 30 variables that come into play when we build a customer’s machine,” explains Allen Gager, design engineer and CAD manager at A.T. Ferrell. “Adding to the complexity, we try to account for likely future processing techniques so that our customers can use our machines 20, 30, even 40 years from now,” he adds. “One reason that A.T. Ferrell has been so successful for so long is that our customers trust us to maximize their investments.”

In addition to addressing customer needs cost-effectively, A.T. Ferrell’s food-grade products are subject to FDA and other government regulations. The company must also design its product with the safety of maintenance workers in mind to address Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) guidelines.