Compatibility of 3D CAD Graphics Systems

The design and operations world has many options available to use in designing, manufacturing, and assembling a product or system.  These include CATIA, Unigraphics, ProE, Solidworks, AutoCad, and others. While all of these software packages have strengths and weaknesses, it is important to have a way of translating a 3D design from one system to another.

(Courtesy of images.frompo.com)

Hopefully, within an organization, a company is using one type of software (and the same version) when sharing a design back and forth between engineering and operations. It seems impossible that a company would use different types of software, but I have seen it done.  Obviously this creates problems right away and I would suggest that these types of companies don't have an idea what is going on.

The biggest challenge occurs when a company contracts out a design to another company and different software packages are used.  This happens quite often where different contractors win bids with different companies.  Rather than try to institute a new software (expensive and time consuming) the two partners use their in-house software packages.

To get different types of software packages to share designs, translation software is used.  Files are created and used to translate a CAD model from one software to the next.  In an ideal world this process should take no more than a couple of hours.

However, several things can go wrong.  First, the type of translation software may not have been tested accurately.  A computer or IT person may thing everything is good, but an engineer or operations person may find there are errors including the misfortune of an "unreadable model".

The conversion process may take several days which is clearly unacceptable in a fast paced industry with little buffer built into its schedule.  For delays in processing the translation many people usually have to help fix the problem, which pulls them away from other work.

Even in a normal design or manufacturing iteration, the amount of back and forth review and changing of models is time consuming and that may not be desirable in order to meet schedule.  For this reason alone, careful consideration must be given to what types of CAD packages are being used by your group and those you do business with.  It pays to work this our early on or you may pay dearly later delivering late products to market.

(Courtesy of www.plm.automation.siemens.com)