Cre8tive Technology & Design can help you seamlessly manage your CAD Data.
CAD Data Management
Many CAD systems come with more or less rudimentary features that allow us to store and retrieve CAD data. The drawing numbers, part descriptions, change status, or material ID that CAD designers need are stored in a database and made available for research and change process.
Mechanical drawings, however, are nowhere bear enough to describe a product: mechatronic components, software (whose share in products is ever increasing), instruction manuals, and other accompanying documents serve as additional information carriers. Making this knowledge readily available across the enterprise is one of the key pillars of CAD data management, which in turn requires integrated item and parts management to really make a difference.
CAD data management concerns itself with structured storage, not just using a file system, but in an organized and structured fashion. There simply is no other way to efficiently handle technically sophisticated products and ensure a short time to market. CAD models and any related data and documents encapsulate a company’s complete product knowledge, its design and engineering expertise and it needs to be made available and operable across the enterprise.
CAD data management how it should be:
- Knowing at any given time where a part belongs and how it is used
- Always keeping designers in the loop and enabling them to access the data they within mere seconds
- Preventing CAD data from being accidentally overwritten
- Having complete visibility into who works with which data
Mulit-CAD
Today, many design departments rely on more than one CAD system and have their designers work with products from multiple vendors. This means that a CAD data management system must be able to integrate with multiple CAD systems both on the MCAD and the ECAD level. PRO.FILE, for example, provides integrations with more than 30 CAD systems, such as AutoCAD, Autodesk Inventor, Creo, Solid Edge, NX or Solidworks, in the fields of mechanics, electrical engineering, and electronics. This integration with multiple CAD systems enables companies to store product data consistently across all systems, a vital prerequisite for mechatronics today.
Reasons For Using a PDM System to Manage Multi-CAD Data
- Product data is stored securely and data access is protected
- Parts and assemblies can be retrieved and reused
- Changes can be tracked; users always work with the latest versions
- CAS data is available across department lines
- Bills of Materials and item master data are automatically made available for production scheduling, purchasing, and production purposes (ERP integration)
- Simplified handling of product variants
The advantages of PDM/PLM in CAD data management
- Ensure traceability through version and variant management
- Control and monitor information from different CAD systems or NC programs along with routings, and neutral drawings
- Guarantee safety through approval processes and engineering change management
- Assist parallelization and concurrent engineering with the latest versions
The functional elements of PLM/CAD data management
- Provision of CAD data in a protected storage
- Versioning and variant creation to monitor and ensure the consistency of all references between CAD models
- Individual components can be changed or deleted without affecting other assemblies in any way
- Support for the parametrization and structuring of parts families
- Where-used lists and Bills of Materials in different formats
- Provision of geometric parameters from the CAD system in the class lists of characteristics of the PDM system