Cadalyst - November 2007 - (Page 42)

mcadmodeling Sharing and Collaborating with Your Team Software lets you share your designs throughout your company — and beyond. By Mike Hudspeth, IDSA W e’ve all heard the saying, “No man is an island.” Well, there is another, somewhat less-known version that goes, “No one designs in a vacuum.” Whether we like it or not, we all belong to a team. That team has higherprofile members, to be sure, but everyone has something they must contribute if the project is to see the light of day. What sets a team apart from an individual is that each member has expertise, and everyone has to work together. A team is all about cooperation. As they say, there’s no I in teamwork. Who Needs It? Nowadays, collaboration is something of a buzzword (in fact, almost a cliché), but its importance is steadily increasing. With the pendulum of outsourcing swinging back out, we have a much wider range of people working on our projects. Outside engineering firms pick up a lot of the work we can’t handle. They either must invest in the same tools we have or find a workable way to translate our data into what they have (figure 1) and back again. Likewise, analysis firms are users of our models (figure 2). Our own marketing departments are making much more use of our models for their job (whatever that is — just joking!). Sales departments are creating catalogs concurrently with the manufacturing process because those folks have access to virtual assemblies earlier than ever before (figure 3). They don’t have to wait for photo- graphs of physical models anymore. They can generate very realistic, high-resolution graphics that can look even better than the actual product. Figure 2. Data sharing might be absolutely Manufacvital to your design process. Getting importuring uses tant data to those who need it should be our data for all easy and straightforward. sorts of things. They use the data to cut steel for tooling as well as generating assembly manuals. One of the surprising departments (for me, anyway) using engineering data is purchasing. These days, purchasing folks can review the assemblies of our designs and cull from them the type and amount of materials to order, the number Figure 3. You’d be surprised at of screws and their size, who needs your engineering data. and all sorts of other stuff they used to have to rely on us to tell them. Even process planners are jumping onto the proverbial bandwagon. Armed with our design assembly, process planners can design workstations in which the actual products will be made. Based on engineering data, they can tell exactly how long a product will take to assemble, how many people it’ll take to produce it, and even how much square footage the factory will have to devote to it. People are even posting rotatable models on the Internet so customers can look at, measure, and order the product. How are they doing all this? Figure 1. Getting your data to flow seamlessly across the digital void can be a challenge, but it’s getting more reliable all the time. 42 November 2007 | cadalyst | www.cadalyst.com http://www.cadalyst.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Cadalyst - November 2007

Cadalyst - November 2007 Contents Editor's window Cad Central Conceptual Inspiration for Less Than $200 From Any Angle - Publish and Share Your 3D Designs NX 5, Part 1 - CAD/CAM/CAE Software Newforma Project Center Fourth Edition - Software for Project Information Management CAD Manager's Survey 2007 Sharing and Collaborating with Your Team To BIMfinity and Beyond! Solutions for Sending Large Digital Files Cad Cartoon Issue Indexes Cad Fidential

Cadalyst - November 2007

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