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Cadenas

Found Faster: How searchable databases speed CAD design

June 18, 2020 By Leslie Langnau Leave a Comment

Searchable databases do away engineers’ need to recreate CAD files. As for importing models, CAD translators keep costs down.

Jean Thilmany, Senior Editor

Engineers spend nearly two hours each day searching for or recreating parts that already exist, according to a survey done by Cadenas PartSolutions, a Cincinnati maker of parts management software. That number represents a significant loss of time engineers could otherwise be spending on more valuable projects.

By doing away with the need to search or recreate, engineers could get back those 1.8 hours each day: an obvious financial win. The key is to give engineers an easy way to find already-existing CAD models that can be dropped into assemblies. That way, they don’t have to recreate the wheel each time they design. If a company can standardize and reuse simple parts like fasteners, it can save a huge number of engineering hours.

But part reuse can be difficult if locating designs is a problem to begin with. How can engineers know if the CAD design for a part already exists if they don’t know where, or how, to begin looking?

The answer is a searchable database. In the past, these types of parts libraries were the purview of large companies with many decentralized parts databases that sprawled across divisions. But within the past decade or so, the search technology has increasingly become available to companies of all sizes.

In 2013, IBM implemented what it called a strategy for the reuse of assets.

“Developing an orchestrated process to maximize the reuse of assets across the product lifecycle increases design efficiencies and tames product complexity,” according to the 2014 IBM article “Strategic reuse and product line engineering” authored by Eran Gery, IBM distinguished engineer, and Joanne Scouler, IBM curriculum architect.

Companies that make products like vehicles, medical devices, and consumer electronics make multiple products that share common elements, which results in “product lines” or “product families.” Reuse of assets across a product line or family is a major efficiency improvement for easing product design pressures, the authors say.

In the article, they outline the reuse system IBM has put into place, which is built upon the company’s IBM Rational systems and software engineering platform.

The company found that without a part-reuse system, companies:
• Waste time and money developing components that already exist in other company products.
• Needlessly change and recreate assets that already exist.
• Compromise product quality by following an error-prone manual process.
• Make needless changes to existing assets.

While IBM was able to implement its program on its own software engineering platform, other companies don’t have a home-grown platform in place. They can, however, use third-party applications to create searchable parts libraries that help do away with needless part recreation.

For example, Parker-Hannifin, the maker of motion and control systems, recently implemented Cadenas Part Strategic Part Management software to streamline the reuse of 3D parts across several of the company’s divisions. The software is comprised of a searchable, centralized database of 3D parts and data that engineers use to find the component they need. They can search based on part geometry, topology, text, sketch, or dimensions.

The project’s payoff is the capability to reuse internal components across all Parker divisions and in the reduction in time spent finding parts, says Tim Thomas, Cadenas PARTsolutions chief executive officer.

All Parker-Hannifin’s divisions were brought onto the common parts management system, which included an enterprise part-numbering strategy, he adds.

Going Up? Coming Together
When a company grows by acquiring other companies, it often must fold in different IT and CAD environments along with the purchases. Because those systems don’t “talk” to one another, they prevent engineers from finding all parts that exist in the company’s CAD systems. This is another way a centralized database hastens CAD file reuse.

Take the example of The Wittur Group, a German company that makes a range of elevator components that include gearless drives, slings, safety gears, cars, and braking systems. Customers are global elevator installers including Kone, Otis, Schindler, and Hitachi as well as smaller, independent installers.

Through the years, as Wittur grew to become an international company, it brought newly acquired businesses’ IT systems onboard as well. It also maintained the acquired company’s CAD files of existing parts, says Markus Aichinger, corporate CAD manager at Wittur.

Soon, the company’s diverse CAD environments prevented engineers from easily finding those parts, he adds. Data was stored in different legacy databases, each with its own material codes, norms, and structure, which had to be sifted through individually, he says.

Not surprisingly, the process of discovering whether a CAD part already existed or needed to be redesigned took a lot of time.

In addition to making the search process easier, Wittur also wanted to reduce the number of duplicate parts to avoid confusion, Aichinger says.  “Our engineers were having difficulty finding existing parts for new projects, so they preferred redesigning them, even though, in many cases, a similar part existed. The continuous duplication of parts also required additional storage space.”

In addition to time spent designing a new part, engineers also spent time prototyping and testing the part, adding further costs, he adds.

Wittur officials at the company knew what they needed: a searchable system that linked company databases and eliminated duplicate parts.

“This system would help us find existing parts for reuse in new projects and provide global users with a single point of entry to find up-to-date production drawing information,” Aichinger says.

To search 3-D CAD geometry, Wittur implemented the Exalead OnePart application from Dassault Systèmes. The system includes a shape-search feature, which locates parts that match the original shape and also displays close-matches in the search results. The tool identifies master parts for reuse to ensure engineers select the preferred part without recreating a part that already exists in the design library, says Gian Paolo Bassi, chief executive officer at Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks.

To find 2-D drawings, the elevator-parts supplier created a drawing information system that runs on the Exalead platform.

“We’re not only able to find the 2-D drawings themselves, but all the metadata—part tolerances, material information, and where drawings are used— associated with each drawing. We can also display a component’s design history and show the latest revisions,” Aichinger says. “Before we had this, our engineers would have to search for this information in different sources.”

Bassi calls Exalead OnePart a “borderline artificially intelligent product” because it recognizes and flags part similarities, he says.

When an engineer finds a particular part within the CADSeek Polaris system, they also find other information associated with the part, including cost, supplier names, manufacturing information, and analysis results, says Rick Mihelic, a former engineering systems manager at Peterbilt Motors, which stores searchable part information on the CADSeek Polaris platform from iSeek of Ames, Iowa.

CADSeek searching parts to find matches

The tool locates existing parts and assemblies using shape alone, text-based attributes alone, or a combination of the two. It also identifies duplicate parts, which allows for cost savings through parts consolidation, standardization, and part-number reduction, Mihelic says.

Typically, CAD models are only classified based on text-based attributes, which are rarely complete or uniformly applied. But even if attributes could be complete and uniform, two items labeled as “valves” can be so different that applying analytics is a waste of time. With the CADSeek system, each time an engineer searches a dataset, such as valves, they can apply similarity thresholds. For instance, an engineer might ask the system to show all models with at least 91% or greater similarity to the valve used for the search, says Abir Qamhiyah, iSeek Corp’s chief executive officer.

But engineers aren’t company employees that reuse CAD parts. For other personnel, who aren’t always at their desktops, iSeek recently introduced CADSeek Mobile, that lets users take 2-D photos of parts on their Android, IOS or Windows mobile device and to use those images to automatically search their company’s 3-D CAD databases for the piece pictures or for a similarly shaped part.

Manufacturers like Moen and Embraer use iSeek’s original shape-based search application, CADSeek Polaris. At those companies, designers and supply chain personnel use the application to find CAD data for part reuse, to standardization opportunities, for vendor price analysis, should-cost estimation, automated quotations, mergers and acquisitions, and for data cleanup and consolidation, Qamhiyah says.

Small parts in particular often lose their identifying numbers, no matter whether that inventory is housed in an assembly plant, distribution center or out in the field. When those vital identifying numbers disappear and parts can’t be easily reordered, perfectly good parts are scrapped or time is wasted, he adds.

Getting the Design Inside
Now let’s take the opposite problem: how to best bring a CAD design into a system so that it can be used to create a part.

a CAD assembly and part on the Hoops CAD translation platform from TechSoft

The additive manufacturing industry needs to get manufacturing data into their systems. It’s traditionally used stereolithography files, though they can be error prone, says Gavin Bridgeman, CTO at TechSoft 3D, which makes CAD translation software. By directly reading both native and standard CAD file formats, products can increase their ease-of-use and ultimately their print quality.

Techsoft 3D’s Hoops Exchange toolkit does this for engineering-specific applications including many in the 3D printing market, he says. “We’ve seen a lot of growth recently related to people creating new software to solve problems in engineering data markets that didn’t exist a few years ago, like additive manufacturing service bureaus,” Bridgeman says.

The bureaus import 3-D CAD data from creators, use HOOPS Exchange to translate those files, and then print from them.

“People can put more manufacturing information into their 3-D files, but they also know how they want something to look visually,” Bridgeman says. “Service bureaus have to meet both manufacturing and visual needs.”

Whether an engineer wants to find a CAD model within a huge system or needs to import a model to create a 3-D printed part, search and translate technologies step in to slash engineering costs.

Cadenas PartSolutions
partsolutions.com

Dassault Systèmes
www.3ds.com

iSeek
www.iseek.com

TechSoft 3D
www.techsoft3d.com

Filed Under: Dassault Systemes, Software Tagged With: Cadenas, Dassault Systemes, iseek, techsoft3d

CADENAS PARTsolutions Expands CoSPEC eCatalog

October 21, 2013 By 3DCAD Editor Leave a Comment

PARTsolutions, LLC, a global provider of online 3-D parts, eCatalogs and sales configurators, and Eaton’s B-Line business, announced the expansion of the popular CoSPEC online computer-aided drafting (CAD) catalog and product configurator. Powered by PARTsolutions, the updated CoSPEC platform now provides on-demand content in Aveva Plant Design Management Software (PDMS), as well as AutoDesk Revit Building Information Modeling (BIM), for all of the B-Line division’€™s cable tray products.

CADENAS-PARTsolutions-Expands-CoSPEC-eCatalog

€œThe CoSPEC CAD catalog has been a great addition to the B-Line division and a valuable resource for engineering and design professionals,€ said Tim Fox, product line manager, Eaton’€™s B-Line division. €œWith these additions, we can deliver a service that will help reduce engineering time and increase quality of design, ultimately helping save our customers significant time and money.€

Launched in 2011, CoSPEC enables customers to select, view and download products from Eaton’€™s B-Line business. The program’€™s high-quality product data is available online in nearly 100 different CAD, BIM, PDMS and graphic formats and can be accessed and downloaded at the user’€™s convenience. All content is available in both 2-D and 3-D non-proprietary formats, as well as native, proprietary formats for trouble-free integration into nearly all design platforms. This flexibility enables engineers, designers and drafters to incorporate the B-Line division’€™s products into designs quickly and accurately.

€œEaton’€™s B-Line division is dedicated to using the best technology available in order to better serve its customers, said Rob Zesch, president, PARTsolutions. By hosting its entire product catalog online, the B-Line division has made it easier to find and incorporate products directly into customers€™ designs in an instant.€

Products available for use through the CoSPEC catalog include:

  • Strut and Cable Management Systems
  • Cabinets, Electronic Enclosures and Wireways
  • Communications and Data Equipment Supports
  • Ruff-IN Pre-Fab Components
  • Pipe Hangers and Mechanical Supports
  • Safety Grating
  • Seismic Bracing Systems

CADENAS PARTsolutions
www.partsolutions.com

Filed Under: CAD Industry News Tagged With: Cadenas

PARTcommunity allows integrated download of 3D CAD models

August 28, 2013 By 3DCAD Editor Leave a Comment

PARTcommunity-allows-integrated-download-of-3D-CAD-modelsGETOtec, the established solution provider for linear technology and mechanical engineering from Munich is one of the first customers to enjoy the pleasure of CADENAS’ PARTcommunity embedded technology. With this global innovation in the field of electronic product catalogs the complete 3D CAD download portal based on CADENAS eCATALOGsolutions technology was integrated into the website in the course of optimizing the web presence of GETOtec. Thus customers have direct access to all 3D CAD data of the product catalog.

This way it is globally available at any time and engineers can define necessary parts exactly without additional effort, configure products, generate interactive 3D views and download the desired 3D CAD model directly and for free into the design space.

Individual design of the web presence due to embedded technology

When redesigning the website of GETOtec the download area was completely revised among other things and attuned to customer’s demands. Thanks to the seamless technology the complete product catalog appears in the corporate design of the manufacturer under the category “products”– with no need of complex programming. This way GETOtec was able to  define certain elements, for instance the 3D preview of parts, themselves according to their demands and needs. Hence, the new web presence got a clearer user guidance which is more tuned to the target group.

On average the integrated solution of CADENAS’ 3D CAD download portal PARTcommunity increased the number of potential downloads from the manufacturer’s product catalog by approximately 30 percent: The customer does not have to go to an external website to call up the CAD data, but finds all information on the product clearly arranged on the manufacturer’s website.

Professional redesign of the GETOtec website by CANVAS

The redesign of the GETOtec website was carried out by the media agency CANVAS, a subsidiary wholly owned by CADENAS. In doing so the original system was completely re-installed on the basis of the Contao Content Management Systems, which clearly allows a more simple creation and maintenance of the contents. In the course of introducing the embedded technology it was suitable to offer the redesign as practical additional contribution, although the integration of the PARTcommunity technology, needless to say, is also possible without making changes to the existing system.

In the course of the reconstruction the offered information was also extended significantly: The product section received a better menu navigation with preview pictures, short information texts and the direct download of documents and CAD files of the single components.

Your product catalogs as integrated solution by CADENAS

The simplified access due to the PARTcommunity embedded solution and the improved download figures resulting from it, are available to every component manufacturer who has a catalog with the eCATALOGsolutions technology.

Cadenas
cadenas.de

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Cadenas

Cooper Crouse-Hinds adds 3D CAD Configurator to Meet the Growing Needs

April 24, 2013 By Stacy Combest Leave a Comment

CADENAS PARTsolutions announce the launch of Cooper Crouse-Hinds’ online 3D CAD configurator. Cooper Crouse-Hinds is now utilizing the 3D CAD and online product catalog technology powered by CADENAS PARTsolutions. With their new embedded configuration platform, Cooper Crouse-Hinds is able to grow their product reach as well as improve customer experience by placing the latest tools and technology in the hands of their customers.

With the CADENAS PARTsolutions online configurator, engineers can quickly find and design the exact part they need, all directly within the Crouse-Hinds website. In just a few clicks, engineers can configure a part number and generate an interactive 3D preview on-the-fly. They can then download the exact model they need in over 150 CAD and graphic formats including native formats in Autodesk  AutoCAD, Autodesk Inventor, SolidWorks, Solid Edge, PTC Wildfire and CREO, Siemens NX, CATIA and many more. This on-demand capability makes the jobs of design engineers easier and delivers an exceptional customer experience.

Cooper Crouse-Hinds now has over 40 families of harsh and hazardous electrical products available through their PARTsolutions configurator, and will be working towards 100 families by the end of 2013.

Cooper Crouse-Hinds added the CADENAS PARTsolutions embedded product catalog to their website to better meet the needs of engineers who need high-quality product models to include in their designs. In the past, Cooper Crouse-Hinds offered CAD models by request only and in a limited number of formats.

Cooper Crouse-Hinds
www.crouse-hinds.com

CADENAS PARTsolutions
www.partsolutions.com

Filed Under: CAD Industry News, CAD Package Tagged With: Cadenas, coopercrousehinds

Printer shifts from 2D to 3D

December 22, 2011 By Laura Carrabine Leave a Comment

Voith Paper decided to improve its design process across its centers of competencies around the world. Each center specializes in particular parts of a paper machine: due to its massive size and complexity, a finished machine requires design input from several design centers. Voith knew that speeding up its design and manufacturing processes would mean aligning its dispersed design teams.

Moving its designers onto a standard platform worldwide meant integrating the Autodesk manufacturing technology with other key enterprise systems. As a result, Voith has synchronized its design teams and achieved new heights in speed and efficiency levels. “By integrating our 3D models into our SAP ERP system, we can make design changes more quickly. Every engineer has access to the same information, said Voith’s Olaf Spitzer. “This allows us to respond to our customers’ needs faster.”

Frederich Spitzer, PDM Support Manager, IT Solutions for Voith, “We are organized into centers of competencies, so every location with manufacturing capabilities has competencies for a certain product in the finished machine. By installing a common Inventor SAP ERP system with help from Autodesk Consulting, we bring all the information that is generated by these different locations together in one system.”

Voith is also gaining efficiencies associated with the enterprise parts management system built by Cadenas GmbH. The PART system reduces design time by providing access to components and assemblies. Design and development engineers are able to see relevant part information such as price, delivery time, and release status in one user interface.

With a common database, Voith’s design team now uses the same items with the same information. By streamlining parts numbers, Voith facilitates procurement, inventory, and maintenance.

Today, Voith is creating more accurate designs faster. Each machine is designed by several of Voith’s centers of competencies and then assembled at the customer site. Since adopting Inventor, Voith has reduced assembly problems.

“By integrating Inventor with our ERP system, we can respond quicker to our customer needs,” said Olaf Spitzer. “We are able to show them designs before we build a machine. For one project in China, a company ordered parts of a paper machine. We showed them the design and they had changes which we were able to make overnight. We then presented the new design to the customer the next day and secured an order.”

Autodesk

www.autodesk.com

Filed Under: Autodesk, Autodesk News, Inventor Tagged With: 2D, 3D, Autodesk, Cadenas, ERP, Inventor, SAP, Voith Paper

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