Dear Desktop Engineering Reader: Tech-Clarity’s three-part “CAD Consolidation Kit” can help you determine the time- and money-saving potential of adopting a single CAD system. While slightly tilted to users in multi-CAD environments, the kit is equally of assistance to users in a single CAD environment feeling the peer pressure to go multi-CAD because it seems to be such a hot trend in the trade press. The kit is brought to you as a complimentary download, courtesy of PTC, who provides a landing page for the download and then pretty much disappears. The kit offers three separate files: Guide 1: Consolidating CAD - Benefits of a Unified 3D CAD Strategy, Guide 2: Consolidating Design Software: Extending Value Beyond 3D CAD Consolidation, and an ROI (return on investment) worksheet to help you calculate potential savings of moving to a single CAD system. For brevity’s sake, we’ll look at Guide 1 today. Guide 1, a 10-page PDF written by Jim Brown at Tech-Clarity, does not come to bury, pooh-pooh or in any manner demean multi-CAD. Brown seems to have no hidden agenda here. He gets that not every engineering and manufacturing outfit needs to deploy or wants to continue to deploy multiple CAD systems. What Brown does is provide ample justification backed with metrics to demonstrate that a unified CAD strategy can be a wise path for many engineering and manufacturing concerns to take. Hard dollars is what it all comes down to of course, but you’re not going to find a dollar sign in this paper. Rather costs take on a few of their alternate forms. For example, early in the paper there is a grid of IT cost savings stated in percentage of license fees. Savings run the gamut from software licenses to third-party application maintenance and from help desk and user training to server overhead. A unified CAD strategy, asserts Brown, removes great swathes of expenses by eliminating redundancies and duplications. Brown estimates that this alone could save more than 23% of your current annual IT expenses. Design reuse is another cost reckoning. It’s a little trickier. You can apply some direct savings, such as staff time regained not designing what you’ve designed already as well as less work validating new parts. Other savings are to be gained, but difficult to quantify. For example, design reuse lessens your chance of making a lousy volume purchase decision, and using common parts libraries should reduce excess inventory and warehousing costs. Collaboration also benefits from a unified CAD strategy. You should have better design decisions since every engineer understands the design and how the CAD system modeled it. Similarly, concurrent engineering is easier to make happen. You also can build templates of best practices to get everyone on the same page, and sharing files is a breeze since you do not have to go through the rigmarole of file translation. Brown says that a unified CAD strategy also makes PLM (product lifecycle management) system integration less complex, while enabling a common engineering process across disbursed workgroups and locations. A common CAD and PLM infrastructure, says Brown, can make for a flexible company. He argues that standardized tools and processes across a company empower you to quickly adjust resources to changing market demands, pounce on opportunities that arise and balance resources. It enables a corporate “design anywhere/build anywhere” strategy. Brown wraps this paper with a list of recommendations suitable for any company considering consolidating multiple CAD installations or going in the reverse direction. These recommendations reflect the pros of a unified CAD strategy, well tempered with the understanding that such a strategy is not for every company. They are thought-provokers, not a checklist per se. No one CAD strategy is right for every engineering and manufacturing company. You need to evaluate your current CAD strategy to determine if it is right for you. If you feel a change is needed, this paper will go a long way in helping you understand the potential plus side to a unified CAD strategy when compared to the challenges of a multi-CAD strategy. Hit today’s Check it Out link to get your complimentary copy of the Benefits of a Unified 3D CAD Strategy paper and the rest of the CAD Consolidation Kit. Thanks, Pal. – Lockwood Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering Download: The CAD Consolidation Kit
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