Appliance Design - September 2008 - (Page 56) SOFTWARE SpaceClaim Professional 2008 helps casual users visualize and edit CAD data without becoming CAD experts. Complementary design tool expedites workflow. I by blake courter Blake Courter is co-founder of SpaceClaim, Concord, Mass. 56 applianceDESIGN September 2008 n today’s business climate, flexibility drives the ability of product manufacturers to stay competitive. As the costs of labor, materials and transportation fluctuate, manufacturers must continually assess the profitability of their design and supply chains. Consumer trends and new manufacturing processes further compel them to seek innovative ways of bringing new products to market quickly and efficiently. Companies developing new products must make the right business decisions for each project, but often their flexibility is compromised by limitations of CAD systems. The established CAD systems, which use a history-based modeling paradigm, require highly trained and dedicated CAD operators, and they cannot interoperate with CAD systems from other vendors adequately. These limitations have created friction points in the designthrough-manufacture process: If the product development team does not standardize on a single CAD system throughout its design and supply chains, CAD models require continual remodeling, introducing potential errors and delays. If all CAD users do not agree on best practices and modeling techniques, it becomes extremely difficult for designers to work with each others’ designs. Important stakeholders in the designthough-manufacture process can not work with or directly contribute to the CAD data. A new solution to these problems nullifies historical interoperability problems and frees manufacturers to choose the right tools and partners for each project. SpaceClaim, which takes an entirely different approach to 3D design, frees product development companies from the limitations of history-based CAD, and enables new and old users to work in 3D, which results in higher-quality design and expedites time-to-market. The problem with history The usability and interoperability problems associated with CAD derive from their complex history-based data models. Every CAD system has its own set of complex rules, which do not translate from one CAD system to www.applianceDESIGN.com http://www.appliancedesign.com
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