Ten Strategies for Becoming an Effective CAD Leader - Part 8

Strategy 8: Manage product design data efficiently

Using CAD tools to design innovative, error-free products
will get you only partway to your goal. An effective CAD leader realizes that
creating solid models is only the beginning. How well you manage, leverage, and
utilize product design data will determine the overall productivity of both
your development process and manufacturing enterprise.

In the past, product data management (PDM) was more product
document management. Engineering organizations managed documents—paper
drawings—within large cabinets using elaborate sign-off systems for approving
and releasing design revisions. In today’s 3D realm, the sheer number of links,
references, and associations between parts, assemblies, and configurations
precludes a manual approach to data management. Fortunately, you have access to
integrated PDM systems to manage data, control revisions, safeguard intellectual
property, and unleash the power of 3D to the extended enterprise.

PDM allows you to formalize and automate workflows inside
and outside of your department. Because modern PDM systems are easy to
administer, you can control the level of access to design-related information
that you grant to technical and non-technical personnel. Within product
engineering, you can set user rights for the players involved, including team
members, partners, vendors, and suppliers, so that contributors can access and
alter the only information related to their specific function. And they don’t
necessarily have to be on-site to access design data because some PDM systems
support web browser access.

You can also administer, manage, and control access by
colleagues outside of product development who can benefit from leveraging
design data but cannot edit or change it. With PDM, you can provide
nontechnical personnel such as managers, purchasing agents, marketing
professionals, and service technicians with access to product design
information—and control how they can use it. Moreover, they often don’t need a
CAD system for access.

Read past articles:

Strategy 1: Embrace best practices and new technologies

Strategy 2: Develop skills and retain talents

Strategy 3: Maximize integration and automation

Strategy 4: Foster collaboration and innovation

Strategy 5: Focus on continuous quality improvement

Strategy 6: Leverage design data throughout the enterprise

Strategy 7: Document and analyze productivity

Strategy 8: Manage product design data efficiently

Strategy 9: Communicate effectively with business personnel

Strategy 10: Demonstrate product development contributions

Download the Whitepaper - Ten Strategies for Becoming an Effective CAD Leader

 

*This article is an excerpt from the "Ten Strategies for Becoming an Effective CAD Leader White Paper", published by  DS SolidWorks Corp.

Ten Strategies for Becoming an Effective CAD Leader - Part 3

Strategy 3:
Maximize integration and automation

Rooting out redundancy, duplication, and waste is the
clarion call of effective CAD leadership. No single product development
operation should be performed more than once, and no one should ever have to
rebuild an existing model. Any time that design data has to be converted or
translated creates opportunities for error. You can minimize the potential for
costly errors and eliminate redundant processes by maximizing your use of
integrated applications and leveraging automated approaches that fit your development
process.

Exporting and importing design data typically occurs
whenever you need to move a CAD model into another engineering application,
such as an analysis/simulation package, a computer-aided manufacturing (CAM)
machining system, or a product documentation publishing application. You may
even have to manipulate a model’s data format for use in some product data
management (PDM) systems. Each of these data translations and/or conversions
takes time and creates an opening for error.

You can completely eliminate these issues by using an
integrated suite of tools to address analysis/simulation, CAM, documentation,
and PDM requirements. To achieve the greatest benefits, make sure that your
integrated tools operate on the actual CAD model, rather than through an
import/export paradigm. That way, you can rest assured that you have removed a
major source of redundancy from your operations.

Design automation tools can also help you to minimize
repetitive steps. For example, you can use design configurations, which build a
complete set of models with varying attributes (e.g., size, weight, length),
from a single base design, to create product families and maximize design
reuse. CAD-integrated Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE) systems can help you
automatically create models of engineered-to-order designs. If you use a CAD
system with an open Applications Programming interface (API), you can even
automate routine, repetitive CAD tasks.

Read past articles:

Strategy 1: Embrace best practices and new technologies

Strategy 2: Develop skills and retain talents

Strategy 3: Maximize integration and automation

Strategy 4: Foster collaboration and innovation

Strategy 5: Focus on continuous quality improvement

Strategy 6: Leverage design data throughout the enterprise

Strategy 7: Document and analyze productivity

Strategy 8: Manage product design data efficiently

Strategy 9: Communicate effectively with business personnel

Strategy 10: Demonstrate product development contributions

Download the Whitepaper - Ten Strategies for Becoming an Effective CAD Leader

 

*This article is an excerpt from the "Ten Strategies for Becoming an Effective CAD Leader White Paper", published by  DS SolidWorks Corp.