Manufacturers selling custom products are often putting their engineers under pressure. They’re squeezed to create proposal documents and drawings as fast as possible, which can lead to inaccurate quotes, for orders that can’t be fulfilled. Engineering departments waste skilled effort on tasks that could be automated. They have less time to re-engineer existing designs, update drawings and carefully check every detail. Jobs are then left open to errors, rework, backlogs and delays. All of this can affect profit margins and damage reputation.
Design automation removes much of the manual work associated with traditional CAD workflows and wider company workflows between sales, engineering, and manufacturing teams. By automating time-sensitive and often repetitive upfront activities, manufacturers are reaping the benefits with more time to innovate and add value to their products, increasing throughput, improving quality, and winning more business.
Meeting The Growing Demand For Customization
There is a growing demand for customizable products across all manufacturing sectors. However, the design process associated with creating CAD drawings for custom products is slow, labor-intensive, and prone to errors. Using design automation tools, manufacturers automatically generate the 3D models and manufacturing data and drawings required to sell and produce the finished customized product. This reduces design time from hours to seconds while minimizing errors and expensive rework.
Streamlining Workflows
Traditional CAD workflows can be manually intensive, inflexible, and prone to error as design, sales and manufacturing teams work in silos. Design automation streamlines the workflow and is consistently accurate and significantly quicker than manually preparing files. Once a design automation solution is set up and has been tested, it will reliably output predictable results. Combined with a custom UI that standardizes the input of values and ensures that the data entered is in the correct format, manufacturers can be confident that the files created will be accurate and free of errors.
Solving the Demand for Skilled Workers
Recruitment and retention of skilled staff is an ongoing challenge for many manufacturers. Design automation enables the knowledge and experience of your existing team to be captured and reused. This makes it easier for expertise and insight to be transferred to new team members. By automating what are often repetitive, time-consuming tasks, existing team members are freed up to focus on more engaging tasks such as increasing throughput, solving custom design challenges, and improving existing products and processes.
Integration With Other Company Systems
Configuring custom products and preparing the documents and data required by sales and manufacturing often requires data to be shared and updated across various company systems. Manufacturers are integrating design automation tools with other company systems to ensure information used across teams is always up to date. Automatically updating information in other company systems is faster and removes the risk of errors from manual data entry.
DriveWorks Design Automation In Action
Based in Lithuania, Novameta manufacture customized stainless steel equipment for professional kitchens. The company was founded in 1997 and now exports to more than 25 markets worldwide.
Novameta mainly produce non-standard equipment, specific to customer requirements.
Novameta use DriveWorks to automate the design of configurable products without needing to re-create models and drawings for each configuration. Users can easily select variable sizes and details in the model, and drawings, specifications, quantities of materials and parts for production are all generated automatically.
Using DriveWorks not only helps to avoid mistakes, but also speeds up work processes by reducing the number of repetitive tasks. Justas Šimuliūnas, Design Engineer at Novameta explains “As a configurator, we chose DriveWorks because of the integration of this solution with SOLIDWORKS”.
Learn More About Using DriveWorks for Automating Your SOLIDWORKS® Designs
Introduction to Using DriveWorks for Automating Your SOLIDWORKS® Designs Webinar
DriveWorks combines powerful SOLIDWORKS® part, assembly, and drawing automation with engaging 3D CPQ sales configurator features to enable manufacturers to implement a successful digital selling strategy, work smarter, reduce errors, and exceed customer expectations.
In this webinar, our product experts will share their knowledge and give you an introduction to Using DriveWorks for Automating Your SOLIDWORKS® Designs.
Learn how to capture and reuse design, manufacturing, and cost estimation knowledge to deliver custom products faster and with greater accuracy, without using complex macros, design tables or configurations.
