Manufacturers of custom products and their design teams are under constant pressure to deliver faster, more personalized, and higher-quality results—all while keeping costs down and sales volume up. That’s where design automation comes in. As leaders in design automation technology, we understand how automation is transforming industries and providing new opportunities for growth. Here are five ways design automation solutions help businesses to drive growth:
1. Faster time-to-market
Speed matters. The ability to bring custom products to market faster can mean the difference between staying ahead of competitors or falling behind. With design automation technology, businesses can streamline repetitive tasks like resizing designs, creating variations, or generating layouts.
By automating these processes, you can focus on strategic initiatives and launch new products, whilst still delivering configured products in record time. All of these benefits are possible without the need to compromise on the quality of your products. In industries where timing is critical, this agility can give you a significant edge and accelerate business growth.
2. Significant cost savings without compromising quality
Traditional design workflows are labor-intensive and can drive up costs quickly. Design automation technology reduces inefficiencies, enabling your teams to produce more in less time. Design automation enables you to generate hundreds of design iterations in minutes, reducing the time spent on manual adjustments. This not only minimizes costs but ensures consistent, high-quality results.
DriveWorks design automation technology enabled Markilux to reduce their design time from 4 hours to 20 minutes. DriveWorks automatically generates the assemblies and drawings for their customized awnings in SOLIDWORKS and saves the data in the PDM database. Their design engineers can rely on the accuracy of the outputs and concentrate on other valuable tasks. Learn more here.
3. Personalization at scale made simple
Customers expect an increasingly complex level of configuration, however, scaling personalization can be a challenge for design teams. That’s where design automation technology can have a big impact. With features like dynamic templates and advanced drawing controls, you can easily create customized designs to meet the complex configuration needs of your customers.
Whether it’s tailoring a product to individual customer preferences or meeting local compliance regulations, design automation makes it easier to deliver custom products at scale.
EBD manufacture fire rated steel doors for both the UK and European markets. The doors requires strict adherence to both local regulations and international standards. Using DriveWorks design automation technology, EBD ensure their products meet both local regulations and international standards. Learn more here.
4. Enabling creativity by automating mundane tasks
Design automation tools take away the hands-on design engineering requirement for mundane tasks such as resizing, exporting, and versioning. Design automation tools free-up design engineers from time spent on repetitive design revisions.
By automating what are often repetitive, time-consuming tasks, engineers are freed up to focus on more engaging tasks such as increasing throughput, solving custom design challenges, and improving existing products and processes.
5. Seamless collaboration for streamlined workflows
Design automation technology removes inefficiencies from the design workflow by automating repetitive tasks and reducing reliance on manual input. Traditional design processes often involve multiple revisions and inter-departmental exchanges, which can lead to bottlenecks.
Design automation tools intelligently automate these processes, enabling smoother collaboration between teams and faster design completion. Streamlined workflows reduce design times for custom products enabling manufacturers to increase their output and meet increased demand.
Using DriveWorks to automate custom product design and drive growth
Blecks, a Netherlands-based manufacturer of chimney caps, steel doors, and steel stairs, had a significant amount of manual workload in their design process. To meet growing demand for their products they needed a solution to speed up their workflow and automate repetitive tasks. To help with this, they began using DriveWorks Solo to streamline their operations.
After seeing the value of DriveWorks, they then scaled up to DriveWorks Pro to take their design automation to the next level and incorporate a configurator solution for their steel door product line.
Powerful SOLIDWORKS® part, assembly, and drawing automation
DriveWorks Solo is the ideal solution to transform how you design, configure, and sell custom products. Using DriveWorks Solo, design engineers automate repetitive SOLIDWORKS® tasks, freeing up more time to work on new product design. Automating and streamlining the process of designing, configuring, and selling products drives sales and improves business growth.
Make the most of a DriveWorks Solo 30-day free trial by setting clear goals, testing key features on real projects, and making the most of a whole host of free training material. Use the time to evaluate its impact on your workflows and ensure it meets your needs. You can also set up a meeting with a technical expert from the DriveWorks team to help you get off to the best start.