Autodesk partnership with GlobalSpec extends component search to design teams

The wall between design and sourcing just got less formidable thanks to a partnership between Autodesk and GlobalSpec that will permit extended design team members—including purchasing agents—to launch component part searches from Autodesk Design Review, a tool within the Autodesk Inventor 3D design application.

By Staff June 1, 2007

The wall between design and sourcing just got less formidable thanks to a partnership between Autodesk and GlobalSpec that will permit extended design team members—including purchasing agents—to launch component part searches from Autodesk Design Review, a tool within the Autodesk Inventor 3D design application.

The part searches will trigger GlobalSpec’s SpecSearch engine to evaluate more than 166 million parts from more than 21,000 part supplier catalogs in its database.

“Autodesk Design Review is a tool primarily for non-CAD users in the extended design team who need to review and mark up design data,” says Mary Hope McQuiston, director of the Autodesk Extended Design Group. “If I’m in procurement and want to consider a secondary supplier—or get more information on a component—I can isolate a cell in the bill of material, and click and initiate a search without leaving Design Review.”

The end user can subsequently take a snapshot of any detailed data that the search presents and save it as a DWF file within Inventor, where it can be stored and shared among all members of the extended team, permitting greater efficiency and speed of resolution of issues.

“The integration of product development and purchasing to be handled out of one program is a great time saver,” says Gisela Wilson, director of product, project, and portfolio management for Framingham, Mass-based analyst firm IDC . “Companies—especially smaller ones—have long tried to get engineering to do sourcing, particularly during design, but engineering hasn’t been too keen on it. It’s a huge time drain to go through multiple catalogues, and back and forth between programs. This adds a lot of value to the Autodesk Design Review offering, and opens the door to supporting sourcing and purchasing from design.”

The new capability will be made available in the forthcoming Autodesk Design Review 2008 release.