This can be the view of many business owners when the design team comes knocking on your door with a request to invest in the software tools needed to leapfrog them into the world of 3D design. If considered on its 3D design merits alone, transitioning your design team could seem an expensive nice to have, given all of the pressures within your business and could be dismissed out of hand before the business really explores the wider potential benefits.
If the opening statement from your design team started differently, maybe greater consideration would be given to how intelligent 3D design can reduce your product time to market and improve product innovation.
You may think that this is a bold statement but consider the alternative. Existing 2D design processes are labour intensive, data is often fragmented, and critical information contained in the Bill of Materials is physically disassociated from the design geometry that is often prone to costly errors.
Will moving to 3D design really resolve these issues?
With the right considerations, changing your product design vision and strategy to 3D can provide significant product lifecycle efficiencies, improve design intent by proving product and material capability in model form, automate 2D documentation output and vastly improve visual output to Sales, Marketing, Suppliers and most importantly, your customers.
It is, however, the intelligent data contained within the 3D model where you will get your biggest benefit. Easily extracting this data into a spreadsheet provides “as designed” accurate Bill of Materials across the business, benefiting finance, stock control, purchasing and the shop floor with real time data allowing material costs, parts availability and design intent to be considered. Information such as mass can be used for centre of gravity calculations, lifting and transport cost considerations whilst products are still in the design phase, so you don’t have to wait until they are physically made. If the design changes and the model is edited, the BOM and associated data is updated along with 2D drawings keeping the entire team aware of any changes.
If you can get this far with your design tools and providing your team with the right skills, then you are a small step away from automating the BOM import directly to your financial or ERP systems.
Robust intelligent 3D design capability helps improve product innovation, automates existing manual inputs, connects engineering data with business systems and reduces product time to market.
Design Automation
- Improving product time to market and enhancing the customer experience
Data Management and Collaboration
Reduce manual process, manage your data and connect engineering data to financial systems.
