Read: Buyer’s Guide: Multi-CAD Management

It’s a given that your design groups, clients, and supply chain partners have their preferred modeling systems. It’s a multi-CAD world. Ergo, you translate, heal, and recreate 3D models. To cope with your Big Client’s files, you hold multiple CAD licenses—companies average 2.7 CAD systems in-house, according to a PTC survey. All those licenses, um, save some effort but not money and maintenance. So, really, the question is how much productivity, time, and money does your company waste every day, month, and year translating, repairing, and rebuilding 3D models and maintaining multiple seats of different CAD packages? Can you afford to keep operating that way when technology exists that can mitigate your multi-CAD migraine?

Many CAD managers will answer these questions A) too much and B) no. Still, the issue lots of you face is that you’re flat out doing what needs to be done to keep work moving. Gathering your thoughts on the criteria to consider a software suite to transform your counterproductive multi-CAD predicament into a productive multi-CAD environment keeps getting postponed. Today’s Check It Out white paper is that blueprint you’ve been meaning to sketch out.

A five-page PDF, “CAD Selection Considerations: Multi-CAD Management: Dealing with Third-Party CAD Data” has what you need to rough out your switch to a CAD system that better enables you to work with third-party, in-house, and legacy CAD data. Written by CIMdata, this paper is a straightforward presentation that’s hosted on a PTC website. The paper does not make product recommendations. In fact, it’s so developer-neutral it cites no developer or application. Rather, this paper argues that technology that expedites working with third-party CAD data exists and this technology is a vital component of the productivity you need to compete.

After some brief introductory remarks concerning the productivity challenges of a multi-CAD workplace, the paper gets right down to the business of the key technological attributes you need to consider when purchasing a new CAD modeling suite. To do so, it poses a short series of questions you need to answer for yourself to define the type of CAD solution your environment needs. The questions are formulated so that simple yes or no responses move you a step closer to a generalized product definition.

Here’s an example question: “Once third-party and legacy CAD data is imported, can our designers manipulate and edit individual geometry items within the data?” And this: “Can the CAD solution handle foreign data’s design intent through feature recognition of form features and patterns?”

The net effect of it is that you define what is important to you. You can then map your answers to any number of CAD alternatives out there, eliminating those that are weaker in areas meaningful to you.

“CAD Selection Considerations: Multi-CAD Management: Dealing with Third-Party CAD Data” is a tidy piece of work. It’ll take you no time to read, but it’ll save you countless hours organizing your thoughts. Hit the link over there and see for yourself.

Thanks, Pal. – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Read: Buyer’s Guide: Multi-CAD Management