“Jack be nimble, Jack be quick” and so should today’s manufacturers. In order to survive in today’s fast-moving, globally competitive world, manufacturers must be agile and highly responsive to rapid market changes, changes in a supplier network, or any other type of change in product requirements. Their product development process must also be nimble, flexible, and able to quickly deal with changes to products as they move through the design cycle.
Design changes are a major bottleneck in the product development process, however, because most new products are tweaked variations of previous products, they are also inevitable. To deal with this reality, product engineers need flexible design tools that enable them to respond to changes throughout the development process, especially last-minute design changes that can prevent products from meeting time and budget constraints.
Change drives innovation
In the whitepaper, “CAD Selection Considerations: Design Changes,” CIMdata takes an in-depth look at how leading-edge manufacturers are dealing with rapid changes to models. Design modifications can often rob engineers of a substantial amount of time and effort, sometimes even requiring full or partial model re-creation. Despite this, change is good; it not only drives innovation, but ultimately market share and profits as well.
In today’s accelerated workflow, design alternatives and variations are proposed, assessed in proactive product design reviews, and then changes are made, impact of changes validated, then changed again. Concept design is another stage during which designers need tools that enable them to quickly explore options, create models, iterate, test, and then create again with swiftness and flexibility. In these environments, decisions must be made very quickly, and as a result modeling tools that require extensive, methodical planning don’t work.
During analysis and simulation, designers must predict how the proposed product will react to real-world conditions due to structural mechanics, heat transfer, fluid flow, etc. When using finite-element analysis (FEA) tools to answer these questions, engineers must often simplify or “clean-up” models prior to analysis. This often requires removing or suppressing features, which can cause a ripple effect to associated parts within the model.
Any type of rapid model change can cause complexities that can lead to downstream errors, especially when designers are working with models created by other designers due to the embedded model constraints and parametric relationships imposed by the original designer. Users of feature-based parametric modeling tools need easy-to-use geometry editing tools that enable them to make changes to the model with the same speed and flexibility as direct modeling tools.
Tools must keep pace with rapid speed of change
With these issues in mind, what specific functionality do users need from their CAD tool to facilitate their ability to make rapid design changes? To help answer that question, let’s take a look at some of the questions that buyers should ask before selecting a new CAD suite.
- Does the CAD suite offer change operations to move, rotate, remove, and attach basic solid edges, faces, and form features?
- Does it allow users to simplify the model by removing or changing the size of rounds and chamfers and change a round into a chamfer?
- Does it provide edit operations without requiring the user to understand design intent?
- Does it provide edit operations that can modify the geometry without breaking and removing existing design intent?
- Will the tool allow the user to capture a geometry change as a parametric feature to edit or undo later?
- When making a change, does the tool allow the user to control and prevent a ripple effect of model changes elsewhere in the design?
Though there are many other factors to take into consideration before investing in a new CAD suite, design change flexibility has become a critically important component in today’s ever-changing development process. Without the ability to make changes rapidly, manufacturers will be hard-pressed to develop, produce and deliver products that keep pace with today’s increasingly demanding markets.
For further information on this topic, download the entire CIMdata whitepaper, “CAD Selection Considerations: Design Changes,” for free here (sign-in required).
