Integrating design automation into your design process enables your teams to work smarter, and your business to be more flexible and efficient. Regardless of how complex your product configurations are, design automation can improve productivity and take you from concept to manufacturing in record time.
Preparing engineering data for a custom product can be a lengthy and complex process. It typically involves an engineer copying existing 3D CAD models and updating dimensions, suppressing and un-suppressing features, and replacing components to meet the client’s specifications. Once the 3D CAD models have been updated, the drawings, BOMs, and cut lists also need to be created.
Design automation tools streamline this process by capturing and reusing design, process, manufacturing, and cost estimation knowledge to automatically create the documents and data required to sell and manufacture custom products. Manufacturing businesses successfully use design automation tools to increase efficiency, reduce errors, streamline workflows, and free up time for product innovation.
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. Subsequently, streamlined workflows reduce design times for custom products enabling manufacturers to increase their output and meet increased demand.
Consistently accurate designs
Design automation technology minimizes human error, leading to consistently accurate designs. This is particularly crucial in manufacturing, where the accuracy of custom designs is key to ensuring efficient design, sales, and manufacturing workflows. Design rules and parameters ensure that product configurations are valid and reduce the amount of rework required. Design automation is consistently accurate and significantly quicker than manually preparing files.
Customize with ease
Design rules built into design automation tools ensure that all configuration options are valid and manufacturable, even for the most complex of custom products. Manufacturers of custom products see huge benefits from automation in product configuration, automatically producing the sales and manufacturing documents and data for each custom variant. This enables shorter sales cycles and improves customer satisfaction. Regulatory requirements can also be built into design rules to ensure every configuration generated through the automation process complies with relevant regulations.
Scalable design
Manual design processes are unable to handle the same volume of custom product designs efficiently. The automation of the repetitive tasks associated with custom design enables businesses to easily scale up their operations. Pressure is taken off design engineers as they have more time to focus on other tasks such as product innovation. Scalability is key as demand for custom products continues to increase and businesses need to remain competitive.
Using DriveWorks to automate custom product design
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.
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