By Sharon Toh, General Manager, South Asia of SolidWorks. 

Across most industries today, profit margins are narrow and will continue to become even thinner. Even in segments where margins are relatively healthy, competition and global outsourcing make cost reduction mandatory. Historically, the high cost of engineering has contributed so significantly to the attack on profit margins that numerous attempts have been made to cut the process time or the cost of engineering activities.

Most of these approaches have been point solutions, which can be highly important in their own right, but are not applicable across the board. Design automation, on the other hand, stands out as an effective means of dramatically cutting costs for a well-defined, well-proven range of engineering activities. This is especially so where business needs demand rapid, accurate quoting; consistent engineering; and, most important, minimum time to finished product delivery.

Driving design automation

The majority of companies share a common goal of reducing design costs.

Traditionally, they have had two options: (1) to design less and standardize the product range, or (2) to design faster.

If you want to limit your customers’ choices, the first option is fine. However, the pressure to customize products has risen tremendously over the past few years.

In a recent Cincom study, 73 percent of total respondents viewed product customisation as critical for products over $100,000, while another 25 percent considered it crucial even for products under $1,000. This trend will only grow. The Cincom study revealed that 63 percent of engineers have seen requests for customised products increase over the last five years, and 26 percent anticipate that the growth rate will be between 25 and 50 percent in the next two years.

Another survey of CAD users asked key questions about the users’ design processes. All survey respondents were aware of design automation since they work in various industry segments that document paybacks from design automation. These include almost all engineer-to-order products and many custom or customisable products—basically, any enterprise whose product must be touched by engineering for a significant percentage of orders.

A variety of companies across a multitude of industries are searching for ways to save time and lower costs in the engineering process. As a result, various vendors refer to different features or utilities as “design automation.” Unfortunately, most of these are not useful mechanisms for automation because they cannot handle the entire job.

For companies that offer engineer-to-order products, design automation is specifically defined as a system that captures and more or less automatically applies that engineering activity to product variants resulting in finished designs in minimum time.

• System: a controller—rather than a random assortment of features—that provides an overarching workflow. Design automation systems often drive CAD systems and interact automatically with product lifecycle management (PLM), as well as with other engineering and office applications.

• Engineering activity: all the calculations, rules of thumb, engineering precepts, and product lore that go into a product variant.

• More or less automatic: intelligent design automation systems automate some things, usually repetitive or donkey work, and keep their hands off others, generally areas where experienced engineers can quickly assess a design requirement and rapidly supply a creative solution.

• Product variants: families of products derived from a central or standard design that must be touched significantly by engineering before full product functionality can be gained.

From an engineering perspective, you can overcome the difficulties encountered in customising a product by using design automation software. This type of software evolved with CAD technology as a way to streamline customized product development. The idea is to capture a company’s in-house design rules and thereby simplify the creation of variations on a theme.

Is design automation effective and efficient?

Design automation systems have been in use since the early 1980s, helping companies to save time and money.

Recently, a machine builder accomplished all the engineering that once took 80 hours in less than one hour by implementing design automation. Within 24 hours, an elevator manufacturer can now create quotes and drawings, including engineering and documentation, which once took weeks with manual methods. A lifting beam company can respond to customer enquiries with general arrangement drawings and a quotation in less than an hour—deliverables that previously took 16 hours.

Even small products benefit—component brackets that took 45 minutes to configure manually at one company are now done in less than one minute.

So, yes, design automation is both effective and efficient.

The benefits of design automation

In the table below, the key benefits of design automation are reflected by organisational level.

Organisational Level

Benefits

Engineer

 Greatly reduces sales support requirements

 Dramatically reduces repetitive tasks

Engineering Department

 Significantly increases departmental productivity and throughput

 Greatly improves consistency, especially with junior engineers

 Quickly enables first-to-bid on quotes

Company

 Easily helps to ensure accurate bid and product costing for predictable margins

 Dramatically shortens time-to-delivery after order is signed

 Readily helps develop true teamwork between engineering and sales

From the table, we can see that design automation frees up engineering time formerly given to repetitive tasks, recalculation, and specification changes. The resulting benefits apply across the organisation, from the individual engineer to the company as a whole.

Design automation in practice

Design automation should be viewed as a new way of working, not as a single project with a beginning and an end that is only done once. With design automation, you can literally treat every part of an assembly as a variable design that can be automatically modified by inputs. Doing so, however, would be a mistake. Your first step is to determine which variable parts require engineering while they are being varied, and which will generally be a subset of a given assembly. Then select a best candidate from among these to tackle the first design, which is typically a redesign that literally takes more time than it is worth.

Choose to design faster—and take your inspiration from the many companies who have successfully implemented design automation. It is a perfect means to raise your visibility in the company, increase your company’s profitability on custom sales, and allow you to do what you do best—design innovative new products.