CAD Standardization

CAD STANDARDIZATION!!

B.C.: Before CAD

Yes many of us were doing engineering before CAD. What was used? Oh yes the drawing! The drawing was the only document needed or actually available. They made BLUE PRINTS. I remember working at Boeing in the late 60's and checking out all the blue prints (copy of drawings) that were necessary to modify or create new parts. There were blue print girls. They provided a wonderful dating pool for all the young drafters. I left Boeing to go job shopping (Contract Engineering) Years later I came back to Boeing, but now they were using microfiche, no more blue print girls, sad to say. We would look up the drawings on cards and print the drawings we needed. Then if we need to modify the drawings or needed them to trace an existing part we would check out the originals. Boeing used undimensioned drawing, mostly sheet metal part (flat patterns) and frames and basically photographed the parts on to metal to make the tools. Many of you are laughing saying we all know that, but realize, many have designers have not made a drawing, and never used 2D/3D wireframe/surfacing and never have done anything but Solid modeling.

The drawing provided the two standards in one system.

Standard Drafting Procedures:

Drawings were the domain of Drafters. You were trained in all the standard drafting procedures. At Boeing you had to know all procedures before you started working in the company, we had many design standards and manuals that were unique to Boeing. Like, you never showed the bolt, screw, nut or any fastener, they were shown as a cross on the drawing. You had to try to match the print on the existing drawing. So we, as drafters proceeded to create drawings with the close scrutiny of the design/drawing checker or engineer. No engineer beside the new engineer would do drawings. Basically the tools of the job were a drafting board, mechanical pencils, compass, triangles and maybe a drafting machine.

Data Verification:

The Drawing provided all the data required to create the part. Part verification??? It was all recorded on an ADCN (Advanced Drawing Change Notice) or on the DCN (Drawing Change Notice) Drawing Revision. Many companies call these ECO (Engineering Change Orders). Simply, clear concise document control.

A.C.: After CAD

I am not going into another history of CAD (I am sure to your relief). TECH-NET has been selling and supporting CAD/CAM hardware and software and providing engineering services for over 22 years. I have seen it all.

Standard Drafting Procedures:

Today what is the requirement for a design job!

What system/systems are you experienced?

Yes that is the first question. Today a company really can not afford to train an individual on a new CAD System. Pro/E, Catia and UG can take up to half a year to get up to speed. More than a year to get proficient. Just imagine (many of you don't need to imagine because you are living it) losing an expert user and designer and bringing in a less experienced person to follow up on maintaining and creating new design. The large companies are now recognizing the enormous hidden costs. You will hire someone on a resume that prior to CAD you would never hire because his/hers engineering discipline was in a different area. Personally I, being aerospace) got a job doing plastic product design only because I knew Computervision (Which was wonderful, plastic product design is the most fun).

Pro/E, Catia, UG, Solidworks, Solid Edge, Alibre and Inventor are all based on the Pro/E paradigm and CANNOT edit each others data!!!

Let's say your company uses one of those system. You now have limited your potential employee to having experience on your system. If you see an applicant with the desired engineering experience but is not familiar with your system, you will have to have access to training to get him up to speed which could take months maybe upto a year. In the beginning many companies that were using Pro/E felt like they were Pro/E training centers. Many designers (seeing their new value) would learn the system and demand a higher wage or start looking for a new job. Even today many companies are at the mercy of the experienced user. The user has a vested interest in making sure a company is saddled with an ineffective and difficult system. So now a company has a choice, bring a person in because of the CAD system and train them in engineering discipline of your industry or train them on your CAD system. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to bring that design expert in and have him/her up to speed within days?

SOLUTION! EXPLICIT MODELING!!

Just hear what Pro/E and Siemens/UG are saying in their ads about explicit modeling. Can Catia be far behind??

Seimens/UG Synchronous Technology

Design experience 100X faster than closest two competing CAD systems

ECOs in seconds vs. hours

Biggest CAD breakthrough ever

No remodeling -- Edit foreign CAD data faster than in native package

PTC CREO DIRECT

Easy to Learn

Easy to repurpose design

Lightweight - Smaller file size

Flexible

Rapidly evolve and explore designs

Maintain flexible design teams

Work with multi-source CAD data

Rapidly iterate designs

Autodesk Inventor Fusion

3D Modeling for Rapid Design Changes

Autodesk® Inventor® Fusion is 3D modeling software that showcases intuitive direct manipulation capabilities for unrivaled ease of use. By uniting direct modeling and parametric workflows, Inventor Fusion offers the best of both worlds. Designers can freely explore complex shapes and forms while maintaining the underlying parametric history. Inventor Fusion makes it easy to open and edit 3D models from almost any source and incorporate them into your design, enabling rapid design changes without limitations.

Standard Drafting Procedure: A wider employee pool.

Yes, explicit modeling is the future and the solution. All of the above problems with incompatible CAD systems is solved. It takes just days to get a designer up to speed on an explicit CAD package, no matter what system he/she is familiar. Like the mechanical pencil, compass and triangles we now have a very familiar set of tools. No complex feature history to sort through, just instant productivity.

Reusing Data. Incredible cost savings.

With explicit modeling you don't care where the part was made, even if they were made in a history based system. You can instantly start being productive. If your company needs to talk to many customers, suppliers or vendors using different systems, you cannot afford not to be using an explicit modeling system. There is really nothing more to say, the writing is on the wall.

More Future!! Creating the data information standard.

PLM, PDM, Drawing, etc.

So at this time now that we have a standardization of CAD solved. How do we standardize data? Yes we can now read the 3D model. But how do we get the tolerancing, material, specs, rigging instructions, etc.

We still have the problem with PLM (Product Lifecycle Management). This was all done by the drawing in the past.

What do we do now???

The 3D part.

The PDF spec sheet or drawing.

The PMI (Part Manufacturing Information)

This all has to go together. We need a system where all this data goes in one document. With the new explicit modeling system we can start creating a standard that can be readily available.

Large companies with large multiyear projects need a PLM system. This needs to assemble the product and keep track of all parts and assemblies and the changes.

SOLUTION!! or at least a start.

We need a product that can keep all the data in one document. Imagine an assembly with links to all the parts, in these parts are the drawings with all the tolerancing and specs. The industry is now struggling with 3DMBD (3D Model Based Definition). With the part model goes 3D dimensions showing the GTD information. For simple parts this is okay, but imagine a complex part with many features holes, flanges, etc. that have to be defined. This of course becomes a nightmare for manufacturing. You cannot just print this out you have to have the model up and look at it in 3D. It would be nice to be able to put these dimensions on a drawing so you can view all the critical dimension on one printed document.

IRONCAD/INOVATE: Leading the way!

IRONCAD is leading the way in explicit modeling. It is very clear this is the next generation CAD system, even though it has been on the market since the mid 1990's it is the only program that has both the Parametric history/feature base and explicit/directing intergraded into one system.

IRONCAD/INOVATE is very economical as compared to PTC Creo, Siemens and Catia basically one third the cost. It is less than Solidworks, Inventor and Solid Edge and offers more.

This is truly just the beginning. IRONCAD/INOVATE has the most experienced design team available with a management team that not only understands the mechanical engineering market but many other markets such as marketing, publication, data translation, ease of use for the non-CAD user, sales presentation, data extraction and more.

Please take the time to review this product. We can get a 30 day evaluation including the sheetmetal and translators. Feel free to call me or go to:

CONCLUSION: Try this Explicit Modeling design approach today!!

After a while things become normal, time to do a job, time to modify a job, etc. We don't have to wait for the other systems to play catch up, you can start increasing your productivity today by moving to this new design approach today!! Look at the advantages:

1. Easy to learn and use!

2. Familiar operations (Allowing new designers/engineers to get up to speed fast!)

3. Easy to modify parts and assemblies (No matter where they were created)

4. Design on the fly (No design intent required)

5. Incredible flexibility

6. Standardization (Parts can be modified in any system)

You can experience this today! Just go to:

http://www.ironcad.com/downloads/trialdownload/