The questions accompanying product design are many and there are no easy answers. Automation offers shortcuts that deal with these various challenges. Answering these common questions via automation technology frees engineers to do more fulfilling, interesting, and rewarding work.
Many engineer-to-order manufacturers are able to manage configured products more effectively when automation is implemented especially during product engineering, development, and release cycles. Manually, design errors increase exponentially.
Powerful automation tools
There are powerful automation tools for defining product structures, managing configuration rules (between products and across solutions), as well as understanding the interactions of options and components in complex products. These tools empower users to make faster, more effective design decisions. Through configuration analysis, BOM (Bill of Material) validation, and collaborative modeling, engineering automation achieves faster time to market with higher quality products at lower costs.
Excel-like simplicity helps create 3D product models and assemblies
Highly configurable products cannot be effectively managed using spreadsheets alone. Solutions like
Knowledge Bridge (kBridge) operate a lot like Excel. Unlike Excel, the technology builds hierarchical product models, due to the native ability to identify and drive top-level design parameters. Users most appreciate fast, simple-to-use 3D graphics.
Engineers mired in non-automated work-around solutions (and frustrated with the segregation of spreadsheet information from design engineering) crave simple and robust engineering tools. Typically, engineers’ top complaint in the manual ETO space is the constant repetition of boring, tedious operations.
Automating operations
Once implemented, engineers can work on well-engineered and dynamic designs because the repetitive issues have been removed. The right tools allow engineers to create solidly engineered products and capture knowledge in a model, then re-use it any time needed in the future.