Breaking Down the Language Barrier Between ECAD and MCAD Design
Manufacturers are under constant pressure to reduce development costs, speed time-to-market, and deliver more innovative products. Products are becoming more and more complex as consumers demand increased functionality in ever-shrinking packages. All these demands require organizations to look for ways to improve design tools and processes and increase efficiency within—and between—the design teams tasked with [...]
Laying the Groundwork for Software Upgrades
As reliable as the change in seasons, CAD software vendors release upgrades in their software, and engineering departments must make a decision about whether the upgrade is worth the time, effort, training and expense. Before embarking upon the process of upgrading the department’s CAD software, engineering managers should take the time to consider their current [...]
Collaborating Downstream: Leveraging CAD Models in Manufacturing
In today’s manufacturing organization, the 3D CAD model has become the basis of all stages of product development, from the initial design, down to creating assembly instructions and programming the shop floor machines that will ultimately be used to create the physical product. Many of these phases—engineering, testing, logistics, accounting, sales and marketing, service and [...]
Product Design Gets Social
Every manufacturer is clamoring to conceive of the next “big thing,” that one new product that will set their industry on its ear, garner the envy of competitors and send customers rushing to local store shelves. So the question is how do companies generate new ideas for innovative new products? In today’s product development environment, [...]
How Product Development Can Thrive in Multi-CAD Environments
Dealing with CAD data in multiple formats is the reality for manufacturing organizations today, thanks to extended supply chains that bring more partners and suppliers into the design loop. Some companies deploy different CAD tools for designing the various subsystems, or electrical and mechanical components, of the product. For other organizations, it’s their customers who [...]
It isn’t Easy being Green: How Sustainability is Affecting Design
Kermit the Frog said it first, but it bears repeating: it isn’t easy being green. In today’s world, however, it might be the only way for manufacturers to go. It seems everyone these days is concerned about how they can positively impact the future of the environment and often that starts with the products they [...]
Dealing with the Complexities of Software-Intensive Product Design
In today’s competitive product design landscape, more and more products derive their functionality from software. Software is also what often differentiates products from one another and what enables manufacturers to customize product functionality for individual markets and users. Dealing with the software side of product design, however, brings many additional challenges that can lead to [...]
Dealing with Late-Stage Design Changes
Dealing with design changes at any stage in the design cycle is an inevitable reality for manufacturers. Having a clear, agreed-upon design specification—based on strong market research, customer requirements and engineering methodologies—can help avoid many errors that might require design changes, but even the most promising and well-thought-out designs can require changes for myriad of [...]
The Consumerization of CAD
Last week, Apple hit a huge milestone, announcing that it had reached 25 billion downloads off its App Store web site. While the term “app” probably wasn’t even considered a word a few years ago, today they are everywhere and they do quite literally everything. Thanks in part to the staggering popularity of Apple’s iPhone [...]
Maximizing the Benefits of Simulation
Simulation tools can help engineers test models digitally to gain technical insight into how they can optimize new product designs. Create the CAD model, simulate it, and then input insight gained from simulation results back into the CAD model. Integrating CAD and simulation software seemed like a logical way to incorporate simulation into the mechanical [...]
