Is MCAD a Misunderstood Function?

MCAD has spread itself throughout the product development cycle. In the past, MCAD just focused on the design phase, but today's MCAD selection is oriented more around business, since many MCAD vendors find themselves repeatedly answering the same questions from companies: How hard is this system to learn and are there pools of trained people that I can readily tap to operate it? What do my company's customers need in terms of file formats? Will the MCAD software vendor support me when I need it? How should my company determine critical areas of focus when thinking MCAD?

These steps are essential, particularly when a company has been using 2-D design tools. The opportunity to modernize the design process as a company moves to 3-D is too good to miss. Companies either hire design and/or engineering consultants, or have them in-house recording current design processes from part requirements to manufacturing and service.

When choosing MCAD packages, one effective method is to put together a series of "typical design studies" to look at how long it takes company MCAD users to complete their designs. Keep in mind that while this measures MCAD compatibility with your company's systems, it doesn't measure an engineer's "thinking time" since geometry creation does not take much actual engineering time.

Before selecting vendors, it's a good idea to create a design process that tests your company's needs and incorporates the ideas created - plus a transition plan of how to get there. Only after doing this should a company think about selecting an MCAD version.

"The most common way to choose MCAD is to focus on what you need it for," says Mike Evans, director of Cambashi Limited (Cambridge, UK) - an IT industry think tank. "There is a lot involved in creating products and unless there is an unusual design task, a company will usually find whatever MCAD package it needs."

MCAD: Ahead of Its Time?

Some smaller project timelines and budgets cannot justify the investment required to implement an advanced feature. Even when the justification can be found at the project level, it often is the case that the MCAD phase of the project cannot carry the investment when the benefit comes further down the line. This is especially true if the downstream benefit is the elimination of the traditionally heroic efforts required in the project's final phases and not a reduction in the project's overall timeline.

"Cost can play into the reluctance of moving into MCAD," says Robert Bou, CEO of Ashlar-Vellum, Inc. (Austin, TX) - a CAD/CAM company. "Some companies simply look at the cost of a certain solution - in this case MCAD - and say that we can't justify it right now."

What also is occurring in MCAD is a "collapsing" of many of the design process functions - which at one time required several tools - into just one individual software program. With the designer/engineer barriers slowly coming down, the danger is that you have people without the depth of expertise in all of the fields that are being collapsed down into the one software process. They may find that they are not able to interpret all of the results being thrown at them.

"If we are looking at MCAD, there is a narrow and a broad view," says Shaun Murphy, software engineer for IronCAD (Atlanta, GA) - a software design company. "The narrow view is that the user needs it as a design tool to create the manufacturability representation of a product. The broad view of MCAD is all-inclusive of the people and processes related to the product design process. The narrow creates manufacturability, the broad fleshes out the form, fit and function."

So, why isn't there a better understanding of MCAD out there? It could boil down to three groups of users:

1. Believes that there is no real need right now for them to go to MCAD when 2-D works just fine for them, so they don't.

2. Feels a reluctance to use it because the tools are just too hard to master.

3. See things only in terms of cost.

"People should find 3-D intuitive because 3-D is how we live, it is our world," says Murphy. "It's the design methodology that some MCAD vendors adopt that can make it so frustrating to designers/engineers that they rebel by refusing to use it. It's not that we in the industry don't want to learn yet, we may not be ready yet to learn something new."