Engineers spend significant time on manual CAD repair

Through a recent survey of 538 discrete manufacturing professionals, Longview Advisors finds persistent inefficiencies in design data handling, even though effective solutions are available. The “2008 Collaboration & Interoperability Market Report” includes results and analysis from Longview’s fourth annual survey.

A key finding in the survey indicates that engineers are spending an average of 3 to 10 hours per week fixing CAD data, but only a third of them are using data translation tools. Yet, 45% of respondents who do use third-party translation software indicate that the applications give satisfactory results better than 75% of the time.

“This brings up the question: with so many engineers spending so many hours in wasteful cleanup of CAD data, why are so few companies using data exchange tools, especially if the applications show effectiveness?” asks Longview Advisors president David Prawel.

“In this age of lean thinking, why squander valuable engineering resources by working on problems that technology is proven to address fairly well?” Prawel asks. “These are the questions manufacturers should think hard about. Decreasing manual CAD data repair would free talented people to innovate more, build better quality products customers want, and beat their competition.”

The free annual publication from Longview Advisors reveals survey results for subjects including data exchange practices, preferred platforms and formats, 3D data handling and deployment processes, tool requirements matching, CAD translation effectiveness, and other related topics.

www.longviewadvisors.com

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