Time to Automate the Customization of CAD models
Product customization is necessary but costly. Most manufacturing companies customize their products. The customers are industrial and professional users, who set high demands for products to be adapted to their specific application requirements. In order to maintain efficiency in generating proposals, documentation, and production, the manufacturers must have a high degree of configurability in their products. Still, the process from inquiry to build-to-order production takes a lot of work and lead-time.
Most manufacturers are aware that their work in customizing quotations and bills of materials can be rationalized with the use of a product configurator, or sales configurator as the software is often called when used in the sales process. Still, many design engineers spend a large part of their time on routine customizations of drawings and 3D models.
Configuration technology is now available for CAD use as well. It can generate great savings in productivity and lead times. And it makes the work much more fun. The change is just as big as going from the drawing board to CAD. You get to avoid the boring routines of manually making a lot of changes that require no creativity. Instead, design engineers can spend more time on developing better products.
Design automation is becoming mainstream. It is seen by many as the next big trend in 3D CAD. Large companies that manufacture million-dollar products, such as the aero-space industry, have long used tools for “intelligent CAD” and “generative design”. Complex and expensive, these tools have not previously been available for CAD systems used at midmarket level.
The greatest potential is in small and medium-sized manufacturing businesses. They strongly tend to specialize in a niche where they can become market leaders, as this generates more growth and higher profitability than trying to satisfy all customers. Specialization also makes it possible to streamline processes with better tools.
How does one implement design automation? The only thing needed for automation is to define the rules related to customization. If you can write these rules down in plain English, then they can be automated, and it’s not necessarily that complicated.
But the “rule-based” tools that have until now been available for CAD use a rule language that is very close to ordinary procedural programming, e.g. as in Excel. These kinds of rules are actually just algorithms for configuring products. It can quickly become complex for people without programming experience, and hard to maintain when the products change.
The rules engine is important. It is important for design engineers to create and maintain their own sets of rules. A powerful product configurator allows for rules to be written at a much higher level, in a way that can be used by designers to define how to transform customer requirements into engineering solutions. The rules express the design engineers’ knowledge of the constraints that must be met in a correct configuration of the product. The configurator works out how the product must be adapted in order to meet these constraints according to the customer’s requirements. This cuts out the need for programming.
Therefore, the amount of rules diminishes significantly. For a large electric motor company, for example, the number of rules fell from tens of thousands to close to one hundred, which covered a much bigger product range than before.
The product configurator must be well integrated into the CAD system in order to customize all aspects of the CAD models. TactonWorks is one example, where Tacton Configurator is integrated into SolidWorks. You start with a typical 3D assembly of the product, which is used as a template. The rules of the configurator determine how parts of the assembly can be changed, replaced, dimensioned, moved, duplicated or removed, depending on each customer’s requirements. Using an interactive form in the SolidWorks window, the design engineer can input the customer requirements. The requirements are validated instantly and the 3D assembly and drawings are automatically adapted according to the rules.
Stepwise implementation. The opportunities are great, but the changes can be implemented in small steps. Basically, it is about making the work of individual design engineers easier. The tool does not have to be implemented across the board at once. It is fine to start with one product and one or two engineers. Once the system has been tested and proven to generate return on investment, implementation can be extended gradually. Once a sufficiently large portion of the product range is included in the configurator, the next step can be to allow salespeople access the configurator over the web, to ensure that customer specifications are captured correctly from the start.
The manufacturing industry must continue to improve its competitiveness with increased productivity and innovation, by using more optimal processes and tools. Rule-based design automation is the next big thing to invest in.
Klas Orsvärn, Founder and Executive Vice President, Tacton
The design engineer inputs the customer’s requirements and the 3D assembly and drawings are automatically adjusted according to the rules