Figure 1: Closed Windows of Opportunity for Change
The following post is an excerpt from the white paper “Tech-Clarity Insight The Basics of Managing CAD – When Brute Force Fails and PDM is too Much” by Jim Brown. It discusses the need for engineering firms to managing CAD files to ensure that data, time and money isn’t lost. To read the report in its entirety and find out what are these minimum requirements read the whole white paper here.
Before discussing solutions, let’s briefly discuss the business need for managing CADdata. The easiest way to understand the benefits of managing CAD is by understanding the problems that unmanaged data brings. Engineering teams that don’t manage CAD data, or perhaps more accurately manually manage CAD data, suffer from a number of consistent issues. They have no “single version of the truth” and no one place to be sure they have the most recent file, resulting in:
• Inefficiency – It takes too much time and effort to find the latest version of a design. Perhaps more importantly, double-checking to make sure they have actually found the latest design takes extra time and effort.
• Overwriting – Without any way to know what files are in use, engineers can unknowingly work on the same file in parallel. Whoever hits “Save” last wins, and the other’s work is lost.
• Mistakes – Inevitably somebody uses the wrong version of a file and makes an error. They make the wrong version or order an unreleased part, costing time and money.
Engineering teams that don’t manage CAD data, or perhaps more accurately manually manage CAD data, suffer from a number of consistent issues.
These problems are common in a team as small as two people. In fact, some engineers tell me that going back to their own projects after a year or two results in similar issues. To make it more challenging, engineers don't work alone, even if they are the only engineer in the company. There are a host of other people inside and outside of the business that play roles in developing, procuring, producing, marketing, selling, and supporting products. Informal techniques for sharing CAD, such as communicating via email or other manual file-sharing techniques, extend problems across the company and into the supply chain. Specific issues include:
• Productivity loss - As the number of non-engineers needing data access increases, workload to create screenshots and renderings takes time away from design.
• Risk – Designs are shared in insecure ways that put company know-how at risk.
• Bigger mistakes – Determining the right version internally is easy compared to a contract manufacturer looking through emails to find the latest design.
On the positive side, better CAD management also helps manufacturers collaborate more effectively. One of the key benefits this offers it to get early feedback on designs so products are made “right the first time” before the cost and time implications of change go up (Figure 1). Sharing CAD data with other engineers, downstream departments, suppliers, and even customers helps identify and resolve issues early to optimize designs.
Explore CAD Data Management Options
Manufacturers have a lot of CAD management options to consider, including manual/unmanaged approaches, file-sharing, formal systems like PDM/PLM, and newer cloud-based systems. Each of these has plusses and minuses and requires tradeoffs.
To learn more about these CAD management options, download the rest of Jim Brown’s white paper.