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Product development — even for the individual CAD end-user — is getting more complicated by the minute. Yet mainstream press continue to focus on the latest, coolest, easy-to-demo feature — instead of tackling the complicated issues. PTC Express decided to ask three manufacturing professionals: what really concerns engineers today, and what are some of the advanced CAD capabilities that help address these challenges?
Marco Arnone, Executive VP/GM, Enser Corp., Cinnaminson, New Jersey, USA
www.enser.com (engineering services)
Greg Cerny, President, Cerny Product Development Inc., Palo Alto, California, USA
www.cernypd.com (industrial/mechanical design)
Sean Motszko, Senior Design Engineer, Bergstrom Inc., Rockford, Illinois, USA
www.bergstrominc.com (climate systems in commercial vehicles)
PTC Express asked: How has product development changed/gotten more complicated over the years?
Arnone: In today’s highly competitive environment, time-to-market is the differentiator between your company’s product reaching the market first, and thus leading to a profitable product. Taking advantage of new technologies to increase design re-use and hit critical milestones is the difference between success and failure of a project. Outsourcing, and the challenges involved, has become integral to being competitive.
Cerny: Product development has become more complex, yet easier, with the many advances in 3D CAD. These advances have also changed the product development process — the basic way industrial designers and engineers work together. Industrial designers and mechanical engineers can better understand the requirements and restrictions of a project and better communicate them. A mechanical layout can be built in 3D and given to the designer who can skin around it. This allows the designer to tailor their design to the mechanical requirements, in an extremely accurate way. And when the database is handed back to the mechanical team, they are able to create trickier mechanical solutions, which in turn make the product work better and preserve the design intent.
Motszko: The amount of engineering information being generated with CAD and analysis tools is overwhelming. Engineers are continually spending more and more time on data management and data file conversion/exchange with customers and suppliers due to differing CAD systems and the need to keep company data secure. At the same time management is requiring more and more collaboration with global design teams. The data management function consumes a lot of engineering resources, which could have been directed at optimized designs.
PTC Express asked: How are CAD users addressing the more challenging business issues of the day?
Cerny: Building smarter models has helped us with our foremost business issues: budget and schedule. Clients routinely call us with a last-minute change to an otherwise totally finished product that impacts a considerable number of parts — and they need it right away. Building the model in a smart way by referencing the right geometry and including the appropriate set of features allows changes to be done cohesively and therefore very quickly, saving our clients schedule and budget.
Motszko: Some view CAD data management as 'white noise' to be blocked out. They become strictly focused on design. Of course, this ultimately leads to downstream errors in tracking product revisions, and undoubtedly comes back to bite the designer. Others become focused on the data management, and the design suffers. Still others become part of the team to implement data management solutions, in the hopes that their jobs will be easier when it is all over.
Arnone: CAD users have evolved over the years to take on more responsibility in the design process. In the past, there were designers and drafters, but in today’s environment, the drafting role has been reduced significantly with the advanced CAD tools available. One of the top challenges facing designers is re-use of existing designs, which reduces costs significantly. The main problem that designers face is re-use of other designers’ models, which are sometimes inflexible and fail after a change is made. I don’t know if the CAD users are really involved in business issues; however, where companies are small, resources have to wear multiple hats and need to use CAD tools that are easy and quick.
PTC Express asked: Do you use extended CAD capabilities such as configuration management, large assembly management, simulation and analysis, complex surfacing, and model quality checks?
Motszko: I only use large assembly management. I have read CMII for Business Process Infrastructure which introduces configuration management. We have CFDesign and Pro/ENGINEER Mechanica available to use for simulation and analysis; however, its use isn't required by project managers. I have been trained in Pro/ENGINEER surface modeling, but the majority of my projects are sheet metal designs. We have ModelCHECK installed but not configured because we have no standards for our CAD data.
Arnone: Enser uses a variety of extended CAD capabilities extensively, including all the ones mentioned. These tools are critical to our success in providing our clients with the highest quality and quickest turnaround possible for their projects.
Cerny: We heavily rely on some of the advanced assembly features like external copy geometry and merge model, as well as the complex surfacing and analysis tools. While we don’t frequently build “large assemblies,” we do use the advanced assembly tools quite often. These extended CAD capabilities enable us to build complex geometry and share it across several parts, thus allowing quick changes to the overall form. The visualization tools like simplified reps and component display let us see and understand the most complex areas and facilitate communication amongst our team and clients. The analysis tools save huge amounts of time and money by reducing the need for round after round of physical prototypes. And, of course, with Pro/ENGINEER’s parametric advanced surfacing tools we can create almost any shape.
PTC Express asked: How do these extended capacities make your life easier?
Arnone: These tools have reduced manufacturing costs due to the fact that the designs are checked thoroughly and optimized early in the process. Without these tools we would encounter increased costs per project and longer delivery times, two factors that can cripple a business. These extended capabilities help with familiarity of the program and interface, reducing error due to translation to other software packages.
Cerny: The combined effect of these tools is extremely powerful. Cerny Product Development leverages these tools to provide a strategic advantage to our clients. Our command of these tools permits us to build highly complex designs that, because of our smart modeling methods, are easy to debug and quickly modify, with minimal or no impact on the budget or schedule. I honestly can’t remember how we ever got by without them.
Motszko: I imagine my life would be much easier if these capabilities were part of our standard product development and change processes. One thing that wasn't mentioned was Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). I believe it will definitely make my life easier and incorporate some out-of-the-box tools for configuration management and top-down design. All I can do is dig in and help make all this functionality mainstream at my company.
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