3D CAD ripples out over risk-takers' operations

Risk-taking, fundamental to the American psyche, is one of the keys to that nation's dominance: a fact noted in 1831 by French historian Alexis de Tocqueville, author of the hugely influential 'Democracy in America'. Today, his observations help us to understand its trading success. And perhaps the most important message is that challenging the status quo can bring rich dividends. Which is why, says David Prawel, principal of US-based consultancy Longview Advisors (and something of a luminary on CAD), more manufacturers in Europe and elsewhere need to overcome their resistance to 3D modelling - and in particular the company-wide collaborative engineering, streamlined business operations and the speed and competitiveness it delivers. "Companies that aren't willing to deal with the risks that accompany improvement are dangerously complacent," he says. "It shouldn't take five years for them to decide that modern 3D collaborative CAD technologies can save them 30% or more of their programme time. It's just obvious and they need to get on with it." His view: the problem is seated in managements' unwillingness or inability to confront issues like differences of opinion between the IT and engineering departments. "The time wasted is just ridiculous: they need to take the risk and build processes that enable all relevant departments to work smarter together, make decisions faster and implement new technologies faster." He also points to a greater malaise in much of industry - that of organisations failing to keep up with what's possible and what's becoming best practice among their competitors beyond their immediate radar. "Most companies don't have formal processes for understanding or recognising, much less adopting new technologies. Unless someone takes a risk, stands up and says they need it, nothing happens - until it's too late." That's true too, and we need to deal with it. But facing up to the underlying reasons for our comparative tardiness in adopting newer CAD is the immediate key to changing for the better. Prawel identifies those as part technical and part non-technical. On the technical side, he points out that while the CAD software community is busy talking about the coming of PLM (product lifecycle management) to the masses, its success is dependent on good communication and collaboration, and that in turn requires interoperability - and not just at the data level. A recent survey of 650 manufacturing executives by Industry Week highlights the mission-critical nature of collaboration. 62% of purchasing executives listed supplier collaboration as the most effective contributor to increased profitability and reduced cost. More than 97% of product development executives selected collaboration with customers as the most effective strategy for meeting customer requirements and bringing innovative products to market. And, over 35% chose collaboration with customers as the key strategy to reducing product development time to market. It is interesting that these business objectives match exactly those touted for PLM. Coincidence? Not so, says Prawel. Effective collaboration is one of the keys to winning in the business of manufacturing and innovation. Enterprise PLM and PDM business processes are built on 3D product data. And it remains extremely difficult for the various constituents of a modern manufacturing value chain to share product data. Little wonder then that collaboration is so difficult to get right. "There are many aspects to interoperability," he observes. "There are a lot of things people try to do in collaborative product development, like sharing CAD files. Problems caused by differences in file formats are well publicised and waste billions of dollars each year. But there are also different design practices. Designers use feature-based CAD systems differently, so when they share the file, their colleagues have no idea what the sender was doing. Understanding intent "Delphi found that over 50% of a typical designers' time is often spent on non-value-add work, figuring out what other engineers were doing and sorting it out - which is why they put so much effort into their initiative to develop and standardise their design methodologies... Their engineers can now pull a model out of their PLM system and interact and collaborate with it straight away because it was built with a set of standard techniques. In effect, everyone has a common design language." Be that as it may, Prawel simply advocates at least a better understanding of the horses available for the different courses. "For example, some of the lightweight interchange standards like Acrobat 3D, DWF, JTOpen or XVL may not do much for CAD interoperability, but they do for business collaboration - because they enable companies to share design models with purchasing, production, sales and so on. Because these people don't need to do anything in the engineering sense, you wouldn't use IGES or STEP to share product models with them. These formats are best for suppliers and geographically dispersed design teams because they provide a basis for co-operative, CAD-agnostic engineering." The point: since the biggest business potential is with the former group, it's worth focusing on the tools aimed at collaboration for the masses. He cites Autodesk DWF, which has been around for several years but was only recently released with a new version of the toolkit called Autodesk Design Review. He also recommends a look at Adobe Acrobat 3D: "Enabling 3D capability to the millions of users who already have access to PDF will proliferate data sharing. There are already third party tools from vendors like Right Hemisphere to help users create and deploy 3D PDF content. I've seen examples of PDF sales quotation forms with fully drafted 3D models embedded and fields to parameterise the model. That's the way to open up 3D CAD for the masses." So what of the non-technical barriers to adoption? Well some individuals lack an ability to perceive 3D images on-screen; others simply lack familiarity with PCs. "In some cases, 3D just plain doesn't fit the business process, and there are social/cultural issues," says Prawel. Nevertheless, all that is changing as uptake of PCs, Internet usage and as the gaming culture grows unabated. 3D graphics are fast becoming ubiquitous, which will leave only skills, cost and standardisation as the barriers. A final thought: throwing designs over the wall for production engineering, over another wall for manufacturing and another for sales, compliance and so on is only the way companies do it because that was the limit of technology. As Prawel says: "If we're going to become more effective, we have to learn to work together better. Collaborative and cross-functional processes are the most important contributors to success in innovation, bar none."