Thursday, October 08, 2009

Are you settling for status-quo in your MCAD system?

Do you remember the days prior to having 3D MCAD? What drove you to making the 3D investment? Do the words-- parametric, feature-driven, top-down design, associativity ring a bell? How about the concept of "collision detection"? Imagine a 2D drawing updating on the fly as you changed a parameter in 3D. All of the above seemed fairly revolutionary 10-15 years ago. Now, simply, status quo.

Over the years, MCAD has evolved to way more than status quo. The question is -- have you? I am not talking about bells and whistle evolution. I am talking about serious productivity enhancements.

Do you make parts that are similar? Do you struggle "re-using" previous designs? Do you find yourself trying to fit a square peg into a round hole? Do you just accept "rebuild errors" as status quo?

I received an interesting email yesterday discussing whether or not the person was going to upgrade to the latest version of their CAD system. By the way, they were FOUR releases back. I doubt it was this particular engineer's idea not to upgrade. But, I am blown away by the reluctance of companies to not stay current or at least reasonably current with the latest and greatest coming from the vendor they CHOSE??? I am the first to recognize that upgrading takes some time, money etc. But, are you truly weighing the benefits of not upgrading?

Let's say you are a widget maker.

  1. Are you spending alot of time re-designing? Do you have to start from scratch or are your models built with lots of intelligence so changes are not an issue?
  2. Are you leveraging configurations, macros, design tables?
  3. Do you leverage CAD part attributes for material properties, mass property analysis etc?
  4. Is Upfront CAE just part of the daily process? Or are you spending the time ,it would take to implement this properly, physically testing your stuff because "that's what we do"?
  5. Are you communicating design ideas and intent via lightweight viewers (every CAD system has them) across your entire organization?
  6. Are you tracking and documenting the lifecycle of your products? Before we talk lifecycle- how about solid revision control and a bone-simple solid ECO system?
I could go on forever. I ask all that are content to stay "status quo", how long do you think you can hold out? My thought would be to push your engineers to strive to thrive!!! Get them to own it and push them to embrace the tools that you invested in. If you have wrong tool, don't be afraid to own up and make a plan to fix it.

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