Editor’s Pick: Balloon Inspection Data Automatically

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

It’s amazing to me that so many people use computers but don’t use them for the types of jobs that they are really good at. Instead,  people do mind-numbing jobs like entering tons of inspection data into Excel spreadsheets manually rather than having the computer do the work for them. In part, this is the result of the “we’ve always done it that way” mentality and in part it’s due to the fact that some jobs are not glamorous so developers avoid them, leaving you in the lurch. A product like InspectionXpert from Extensible CAD Technologies addresses both phenomena, which is what caught my notice.

The company recently announced InspectionXpert for CATIA V5. It’s designed to take the tedious job of building your first article as well as in-process inspection reports and make it as efficient as possible through automation. With this CAD-integrated product, you can capture inspection dimensions, notes, geometric tolerances, hole callouts, and other data directly from your CATIA 2D drawings and 3D models. And you can have it automatically balloon inspection characteristics directly onto your 3D CATIA models. And all of this data can be placed into customizable and filtered Excel-based forms for your clients or for the boss.

One thing that the boss and you will notice is that your reports are more accurate because you are taking the data directly from the model into a report, which means the chances of really messing it up with a bunch of typos isn’t going to happen. And it’ll be noticed that you have a lot more time to do other productive things. You’ll probably get fewer headaches too.

InspectionXpert for CATIA V5 is not about the most glamorous part of the job. It’s much more fun designing or blowing up things than generating inspection reports. But InspectionXpert is about what might be the most critical thing you do: Making sure that what you are doing with those designs you slaved over is right. Having an old-fashion, error-prone, and slow process in the middle of your high-tech wizardry isn’t right. It’s a vulnerability.

You can learn more about InspectionXpert for CATIA V5 from today’s Pick of the Week write-up. There’s a video link to a version of the software for SolidWorks – CAD-integrated editions are also available for Autocad and Pro/ENGINEER – that’ll give you the idea about this version for CATIA V5.

Thanks, pal.—Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Read today’s Pick of the Week write-up.

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