Designing for Manufacturability: Five Ways SOLIDWORKS Makes It Easier
There are countless factors that can affect the manufacturability of a product, and each can significantly affect when (and whether) the final product is ready to go to market. Designers who use SOLIDWORKS solutions have access to a multitude of tools that can streamline and automate their work processes, while helping to ensure the transition into the manufacturing phase is a seamless (and timely) one.
Read on to discover 5 unique ways that SOLIDWORKS lets your team design with confidence and helps ensure products are delivered on time and on budget.
1. Automatically Create Inspection Documentation
Product designers and engineers have traditionally created First Article Inspections (FAI), inspection reports and ballooned drawings manually. This is time-consuming and, more importantly, leaves plenty of room for user error.
With SOLIDWORKS Inspection, the creation of inspection documents, such as AS91003 or PPAP forms, is automated and continually updated in real time so the chance of errors is greatly reduced. It can also provide a time savings of up to 90 percent, which means your team can spend more time working on other product development tasks.
2. Easily Create High-quality Graphic Assets for Presentations
They say a picture is worth a thousand words – especially when it comes to selling design concepts to a customer, prospect or internal stakeholders – but creating high-quality imagery can be a massive time sink for the design team.
SOLIDWORKS Composer makes creating high-quality graphics and optimizing workflows easy and stress-free. With built-in support for a wide range of 3D CAD formats, as well as neutral file formats, you can easily produce exploded views, vector and raster graphics, shaded illustrations or silhouette, wireframe, and flat renderings using the CAD model.
3. Automatically Generate and Modify Electrical Schematics
New products are often just variations of existing products that have been tweaked or reconfigured to meet a customer’s needs or requirements so the ability to easily reuse design data can save significant time in the development process.
With SOLIDWORKS Electrical, designers have a range of tools at their fingertips to help reuse their existing 3D CAD models and 2D drawings to accelerate the design process. By leveraging the solution’s built-in libraries of symbols, manufacturer part information, and 3D component models, designers can save time and development costs by reducing the need to perform repetitive design tasks.
4. Automatically Update Documentation and Bill of Materials (BOM)
Design changes affect the entire final product and when BOMs and cut lists need to be manually updated to account for those tweaks, there is an increased probability of error and miscommunication.
To ensure design process productivity, SOLIDWORKS BOM enables automatic bill of materials creation and automatic balloon noting of exploded views, whenever a design change occurs. This automation ensures everything is correctly updated and communicated in real-time to the rest of the development team.
5. Print Directly to 3D Printers
3D printers have revolutionized our ability to visualize and prototype products – seeing your design take form away from the user interface can help identify issues or concerns early before the product goes to manufacturing – but getting the right data to the printer can be a cumbersome process.
With SOLIDWORKS, you can output designs directly to .STL, the 3MF, AMF and other formats so there’s no need to worry about post-processing or using additional applications to translate the data. With SOLIDWORKS, sending a 3D file to print is similar to printing a document right from your office printer.
With SOLIDWORKS, designing for manufacturability isn’t a step in the process – it’s an integral part of the design process. SOLIDWORKS gives designers access to a suite of tools that can simplify their workflow and help eliminate the kind of data and communication errors that can cause costly delays in manufacturing.
For more in-depth insight into connecting your entire team and streamlining your product development process with SOLIDWORKS, download our free eBook.
Alyson Savelle
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