How will the CAD market develop in 2023?
The question is interesting, and not only from a strictly technological point of view. There are also world events and macroeconomic trends to consider. The combined effects of Russia's aggression against Ukraine, the growing recessionary trend, disrupted logistics and supply chains and the lingering influence of COVID-19 are turning old truths on their head.
But increasingly explosive technological development also has a big impact. PLM, AI and PLM-adjacent tools like simulation, digital twins, digital threads, IIoT and new SaaS business models are all among the important factors that are overturning the development patterns in a myriad of ways—particularly in an effort to meet the macroeconomic trends.
What will be the combined effects of these external factors together with rapid technological development? Which effects in particular stand out?
I have discussed these questions with PTC's VP and head of the CAD division, Brian Thompson, to see where these trends are expected to bring developments in the CAD space in 2023.
Going into the 2023 CAD market, PTC’s leader sees five primary emerging trends, many of which are associated with PLM and product development. These are:
- Adopting Simulation Driven Design
- Enabling Innovation with Emerging Technologies
- Driving PLM and the Digital Thread Through the Design Process
- Taking Advantage of Cloud Computing and SaaS
- Investing in Training
“In 2023, the CAD market will continue to be driven by manufacturers' need for relevant responses to a range of unique macroeconomic trends. Interestingly, these trends, which we saw accelerate during the COVID-19 pandemic, are affecting large businesses and small businesses in different ways,” he says.
“We are in a high inflation environment. Raw materials and parts are more expensive than ever, and well-documented supply chain constraints continue to affect manufacturers. Other important macro trends in play are the strength of the dollar against the euro. As the euro weakens, manufacturers who buy raw materials in euros feel significant margin pressure, while those who sell products in Europe—but typically do business in U.S. dollars—see significant revenue impacts. Ultimately, this impacts revenue which can trigger changes in a variety of investment plans that manufacturers may need to drive growth in their businesses.”
Combined with other macro-policy challenges, these two trends create uncertainty about the economic outlook for 2023. While this wave of uncertainty will affect the entire market, enterprise and medium sized businesses are better equipped to manage risks, claims Thompson.
“Exactly. These companies know that they need to continue investing through the downturn if they want to take advantage of the inevitable rebound. In fact, enterprise and medium-sized businesses largely maintained or even increased their product development spending through the COVID-19 pandemic. Smaller companies tended to run on lower margins with less financial cushion and less ability to impact upstream costs, so they were much more careful with incremental spending during that time. Should these macro-trends continue, we would expect to see less spending from smaller companies throughout 2023,” he says.
Trend 1: Adopting Simulation Driven Design
One of the new truths in product realization is that no domain stands on its own. The demarcation lines between product development and PLM-adjacent tools are slowly fading away, and we’re moving into a situation where the general development in all sub-domains points toward increased interaction, and fully integrated capabilities where connected digital tools are basic enablers.
Holistic and silo-free processes—where seamless connections to nearly the entire value chain are gaining ground—and will be initiated and established. As an example, those who currently work with CAD development of products have increasingly started to use simulation and analysis in the development work in the earliest stages. This illustrates how CAD and simulation & analysis are moving towards higher levels of merging.
“In 2023, we expect to see continued momentum for Simulation Driven Design (SDD) in the market. Instead of primarily applying simulation technology at the end of the design process, we expect to see continued expansion throughout the design process by designers and engineers,” says Thomson.
“This ‘shift to the left’ strategically positions simulation at the earliest practical point of the product development process. This enables organizations to create higher-quality designs and better control costs, through more well-informed decisions made earlier in the design process. Additionally, it enables greater innovation by allowing companies to explore many more potential designs using digital testing. It is this tempting combination of higher quality, more innovative and more cost-effective designs, coupled with newer user-friendly technologies such as real-time simulation, that is accelerating the adoption of SDD.”
Here, Thomson argues that companies have wanted to adopt SDD practices for years, but at the same time, disconnected tools and fragmented processes have blunted these efforts.
“Expanding the use of simulation tools is still a process change that takes work and commitment, just like any other change. The introduction of simulation technology directly integrated into the CAD tools that designers and engineers are already using is eliminating the largest barrier for adoption. Designers and engineers can now use simulation tools both with the native CAD model and within their current design processes,” he says.
It is this deep integration, often backboned by PLM and similar technologies, that enables the digital thread. With this integration, changes and updates made during SDD are instantly reflected within the record of the digital thread.
“This is particularly important because it enforces the authority of the ‘single source of truth’ across the value chain—creating consistency by preventing errors and ensuring efficiency by reducing process cycle times,” claims Thomson.
“As a result, we are seeing continued growth in new accounts acquiring these technologies and, more importantly, broader adoption and expansion within existing accounts for businesses large and small,” he explains. “Companies benefit from greater agility by being able to rapidly validate and develop designs, improve quality, increase speed to market and design with greater confidence. Customers also explore a wider range of design concepts with simulation technology rather than with costly prototypes, creating a higher probability of delivering more optimal products.”
Trend 2: Enabling Innovation with New Technologies
New design technologies, such as generative design—smart algorithm-based technology where the software suggests optimal solutions—and additive manufacturing are driving innovation in product development.
“These technologies significantly broaden the potential solution space for how a particular set of design objectives can be achieved. In short, the realm of possibilities is broader; the art of the possible is greater. While many larger companies are experimenting and integrating these new technologies into their workflows, it is the smaller, more nimble ones who are leading the way,” commented Thomson.
As for generative design algorithms, he notes that they are “unbiased” because they are unencumbered by human thought processes. Generative design programs automatically select the optimal solution by considering material stresses or fluid flow, and many other factors. PLM can often act as a repository for all these factors, considerations and other information.
“Users define the design problem, and the engine determines an array of optimal solutions, often many that no human would [come up with]. It can achieve in hours or days what would take designers weeks or months to do by themselves, assuming they even had the time and budget to explore that many options. By shifting the focus away from the creation of geometry to a better definition of the problem, generative technology enables engineers to focus on what they do best—engineering,” Thomson says.
By integrating this technology deep into the CAD tool, using the built-in CAD model, he says that “engineers can incorporate generatively developed designs into their existing designs.”
“It creates an agile process that takes full advantage of the benefits of parametric CAD. This is what makes generative design a driver for significant innovation, instead of a semi-useful point solution that is disconnected from the rest of the process.”
Similarly, additive manufacturing enables companies to develop unique designs that cannot be obtained with any other manufacturing technology.
“During the last decade, this potential has led many companies to experiment with additive technology and achieve amazing results,” Thomson says. “Take, for example, the case of our corporate customer, Advanced Engineering Solutions. The company optimized the design for a helicopter replacement heat exchanger. Using grid structures that could only be manufactured using additive technology, the heat exchanger was designed and manufactured to be half the size of the original, while delivering four times the cooling power.”
This, according to Thomson, is the type of innovative use case that is driving more and more customers to integrate design for additive manufacturing tool directly into their PLM and design process.
“Similar to generative design, a point solution breaks the digital thread. This both prevents designers from benefiting from the built-in CAD model and creates significant duplication of effort.”
Thomson further notes that users must work in the native CAD model to be truly innovative.
“This is done with technologies that are fully integrated into their existing workflows. Designers want the same results with high accuracy and sophisticated relationships between all aspects of their design, regardless of the origin of the geometry or the intended manufacturing technique. Without integration, designers are stuck with a ’broken’ toolchain and are unable to take full advantage of the benefits and power of parametric CAD. It is in integration that the opportunity for innovation lies. True innovation takes full advantage of the best technology for the design task, across all parts of the design, without sacrificing how these different parts interact with each other functionally.”
Trend 3: Driving PLM and the Digital Thread Through the Design Process
For years, companies have been aware of the value of working with PLM and model-based systems engineering (MBSE) and have thus scaled their use of the CAD model throughout the organization. The goal is to increase efficiency and eliminate errors by driving a digital thread, often made using PLM and MBSE tools, between functions and across the entire organization.
“But then what is the digital thread?” asks Thompson. “A digital thread creates a closed loop between digital and physical worlds to optimize products, people, processes and places. It's a way to create universal access to data—a single source of truth. When implemented across a value chain, it can create consistency and foster collaboration by aligning different functions around a robust set of data. The data set is enabled with real-time data synchronization so upstream and downstream information is available to all users.”
A problem is that many companies today continue to use multiple, disconnected tools within the design process. “This breaks the digital tool chain, decreasing agility, flexibility and efficiency, all while introducing multiple opportunities for error. As competition increases and supply challenges persist, companies need to find ways to deliver better products to market faster and at lower costs,” Thomson says.
“They are realizing the benefits of driving a digital thread through the product development process to capture the full value of the 3D CAD model. By pulling the digital thread through the product development process [via PLM], customers effectively eliminate data handoffs across disparate tools. Data handoffs cost time and energy and introduce opportunities for error. If a user switches systems once, they will need to do it again. And once they do this, the digital thread is broken, creating the need for manual, disconnected rework. More than ever, we are seeing customers build fully associative deliverables that are both reusable and easily updated as designs evolve.”
A primary example of this growing trend is driving manufacturing deliveries from the CAD system, which eliminates the need for point solutions such as toolpath machining for components or parts.
“Like the challenges of disconnected tools within design, this disconnect introduces unnecessary friction, especially as designs evolve. By driving these deliverables from the CAD tool, companies are removing a point of friction, maintaining associative links and getting rid of unnecessary data handoffs. This is, for example, decreasing the amount of time it takes to get parts ready to be machined on the factory floor while eliminating opportunities for error.”
Trend 4: Take advantage of Cloud Computing and SaaS
By 2023, 50 percent of all enterprise software spending is projected to be on SaaS applications. In short, the model has grown strongly.
“It has,” says Thompson. “As organizations continue to invest in SaaS and the cloud, their expectation is that software vendors will also invest in functionality that takes advantage of what SaaS and the cloud can offer. Design software is no exception to this trend, and the first place to expect changes will be in licensing and deployment. Imagine managing all your user entitlements and deploying software for the entire company, regardless of location, from the comfort of your own desk using a lightweight web portal. For large companies, this represents a significant time savings and reduction in complexity while enabling greater control.”
Thomson further points to another area where the Cloud, PLM and SaaS models can have significant improvements: collaboration.
“By enabling design software with the power of the cloud, multiple users will be able to work on the same design simultaneously in a shared environment. This will also make it much easier to both expand the collaboration team to include people outside the company, such as suppliers and partners, and to control IP.”
“Access to elastic compute resources will also be a major benefit for engineering design tools. Cloud computing will be used to dramatically scale the power of technologies such as generative design. We are already starting to see companies take advantage of elastic computing to broaden the design space using generative technology, investigating hundreds of potential solutions in the time it usually takes to investigate one. Lastly, as customers move to SaaS, they will automatically gain access to new capabilities on a regular basis, and never have to worry about planning a version upgrade again.”
Trend 5: Invest in Education
The final trend we see as we enter 2023 has been around for a long time: education for PLM and PLM-adjacent tools.
“That's how it is,” Thomson says. “We are seeing a resurgence in training as more companies get focused on driving the digital thread through the value chain. The need to produce high-quality, directly manufacturable 3D models is forcing companies to double-down on good modeling practices.”
By establishing and leveraging PLM best practices between teams through effective training, design reuse and collaboration, companies become more effective.
“Designers want to reuse existing designs because it saves time and energy. However, if the modeling methods used to create these patterns are incorrect or incomprehensible to the next designer, then there is significantly less value in reusing them,” Thomson says.
The other challenge driving more companies to invest in PLM and design tool education is the growing shortage of engineering talent.
“The fact is,” notes Thompson, “that we’ve seen predictions that by 2030 the world will be short of millions of engineers. Companies, regardless of size, are already feeling the shortage and have recognized that they need to make their designers as effective as possible. The competition for engineering talent is also creating an employee retention challenge for companies. Designers looking to improve their marketability will change jobs to gain access to training and certifications. Conversely, some companies are mandating that certifications be completed to ensure credibility with and demonstrate their reliability to customers.”
These factors will make education doubly important in 2023. “Well-trained designers using shared processes will eliminate confusion, accelerate design iterations, improve quality and drive higher levels of collaboration and innovation,” Thomson says.
“Ultimately, companies want more efficient, productive engineers who create high-quality, direct-to-manufacture designs that are reusable and associative up and down the value chain. They want the design to be digitally tested with integrated simulation technology throughout the product development process. Naturally, they want these designs to take advantage of the very latest in additive manufacturing and generative techniques, where appropriate. Even with such advanced technologies, which are deeply integrated into the CAD environment, basic training in their application is by far the most effective path to full productivity. This gives engineers and designers the knowledge and resources they need to keep the digital thread intact.”