How to Choose the Most Appropriate CAD Interoperability Solution

Discrete manufacturers seeking ways to streamline all aspects of their businesses have started to focus more attention on the product development cycle as an area ripe for improvement. Taking time and money out of the product development cycle can pay big dividends for makers of cars, airplanes or bulldozers, to cite examples. In fact, a September 2000 study by industry analyst Aberdeen Group asserts that, "with 70 percent of a product's total cost embedded before manufacturing and delivery, the greatest impact on product cost (and innovation) is made during the design phase."¹

At the same time, we are in an era during which products are increasingly being created by "distributed" teams of engineers. Large OEMs are delegating significant design responsibilities to their key suppliers. Also, major manufacturers that have grown through acquisitions or mergers are seeking to realize the benefits of these business combinations by bringing together formerly isolated internal engineering teams to work together on major new projects.

Hence, there is a growing interest today in solutions that will both optimize the development process and enable engineers to work more effectively together. A wide variety of "engineering collaboration" offerings are now available that address different aspects of this complex problem in different ways, and that provide different benefits to customers. Some of them focus primarily on creating inexpensive, Web-based interactive collaboration media, while others focus more on enabling actual engineering information to be shared quickly, completely and accurately.

However, effective engineering collaboration has long been hindered by incompatible data formats among 3-D mechanical CAD systems from different vendors. This incompatibility has imposed huge time and cost penalties on companies that produce complex mechanical products. To demonstrate, a 1999 study for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) concluded, "imperfect interoperability imposes at least $1 billion per year on members of the U.S. automotive supply chain."²

Extrapolating this figure worldwide and across other affected industries crystallizes the magnitude of the problem. As design teams have become more heterogeneous, and the need for collaboration more pressing, this problem has become increasingly urgent.

However, efforts to enable effective data transfer between disparate CAD systems to date have produced limited results and lagged behind the evolution of CAD software itself. A modern CAD user thinks and creates by manipulating higher-order features and constraints sometimes termed "design intelligence," while prior generations of engineers were forced to work with more rudimentary geometric constructs such as boundaries and surfaces.

Up until recently, CAD translation software, services and standards only enabled the transfer of basic geometry between CAD platforms, facing engineers with the unproductive necessity of re-creating much of a design manually or outsourcing the same task to a third party. Since a given part design for a new car may typically be iterated six to seven times before being finalized, and since each design transfer can take days or weeks, cost thousands of dollars and possibly introduce human error, the cumulative impact can be very substantial.

New Generation of CAD Interoperability Solutions

All of these new offerings aim to achieve the same basic goal: to allow a feature-based 3-D design that has been created in one CAD environment to be accurately replicated in others. But a user can buy this capability in different ways. Some vendors offer an outsourced Web-based service to customers, sometimes using specially developed technology in-house as a tool to simplify the process. Others offer a stand-alone software product that users license and operate themselves.

The respective advantages of these two business models are fairly evident. Using an outsourced service has little or no up-front cost associated with it, and lets customers pay as they go. Also, there is no need for customers to install and maintain a software application on their in-house IT infrastructure.

On the other hand, a purchased software product, while initially more costly, may prove less expensive with frequent use. Further, by owning and operating the software themselves, customers can exercise better control over turnaround time, sometimes a critical consideration. Lastly, by avoiding the necessity of sending highly confidential design information outside of their own company, concerns over the security of intellectual property can be minimized.

Judging Performance

Judging a solution's performance in practice is very situation-specific. First off, potential customers should make sure that a vendor supports the CAD software packages and the specific version level of each such package that they may require. Further, prospects should have a clear understanding of the range and type of assemblies and parts that their company designs, and be prepared to discuss this in detail with each supplier. This is important because one vendor's product or service may excel in dealing with machined parts, for instance, while a competitor may do a better job with sheet metal.

Companies also should pay special attention to how each offering deals with situations where one or more CAD features cannot be successfully translated by software. For example, some outsourced services have an on-staff engineer manually recreate the missing feature(s) in the target system. While these services can promise 100 percent feature content in the translated design, having a human being - especially one not familiar with the intentions of the original designer - make such decisions can lead to difficult-to-spot design misinterpretations or outright human error in the resulting part file. A stand-alone software product, on the other hand, may allow the designer better understanding of - and control over - the exchange process, by means of user-settable options and detailed reports.

While it takes some care to select the most appropriate CAD interoperability solution, it is clear that effective deployment of one can save weeks or even months during a major product development program. Depending upon business strategy and market dynamics, a manufacturer can use this time to steal a march on competitors, bring an innovative new product to market earlier than anticipated, or devote extra design time to engineering a more innovative, high-quality end product. Either way, the result is a more competitive enterprise.

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