Today’s economic climate has affected most industries and companies, leaving many manufacturers seeking innovative solutions to achieve their goals of working leaner, faster, and smarter. For many of them, sharing 3D product data efficiently and effectively remains a difficult and potentially costly necessity.

As products become more complex in their design, manufacture, and distribution, organizations need scalable solutions that cut costs, accelerate product development, and facilitate communication and collaboration with internal and external stakeholders. But several factors complicate sharing product design data:

Poor data quality (requires a solution to repair).

Incompatible CAD formats (requires a solution to translate between formats).

Protecting intellectual property (IP needs to be removed manually).

Easy transfer/distribution of large/heavy/complex CAD data (requires creation of smaller/simplified “use case specific” CAD models).

Accessing product design data within the PDM/PLM system (requires support from IT or adoption of new technology for downstream users).

Ensuring the data you share is “current” throughout enterprise and supply chain (requires any and all of the above be performed quickly).

Perhaps the most painful of all these issues is maintaining currency between “derivative” (and distributed) CAD product data and the original design data (the master model). To describe this problem in plain terms, imagine spending 2 hours preparing and converting a simple CAD file for a vendor who needs precise B-rep data to make a mold.

Enlarge this picture Fig. 2. With Anark Core Workstation, one can bind PDM, CAD attributes, PLM, and SAP data directly to PDF template.

This seemingly insignificant 2 hours prep time scales quickly when multiplied by the number of files that require similar treatment and the number of times these parts are revised. Assuming a fully burdened labor cost of $100/hour, it’s easy to imagine scenarios where hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars are being wasted on CAD data preparation and sharing tasks — tasks that don’t add any value to the end product.

Unfortunately, and all too typically, this entire manual, repetitive, and labor-intensive process is also prone to error, which can have cascading effects up and down the supply chain.

A recent survey from Longview Advisors titled “Collaboration & Interoperability Market Survey Analysis 2008” found that a “substantial number” (of more than 500 respondents) “send out more than 10,000 (CAD) files per month.” For small- or medium-sized businesses, this number may be closer to 100 files per month. Using data from this survey, one can estimate the costs involved in such scenarios. (See Table 1.)

In reality, the time required to prepare CAD data for design collaboration and data exchange is probably much more than 2 hours. Consider a list of typical CAD preparation tasks required to send precise B-rep models to an external stakeholder (not including time spent configuring or managing access to a file server):

Check out assembly or part from PDM system.

Load original part or assembly.

Save a copy (this model is now orphaned from version control).

Delete irrelevant or unnecessary sketches, parts, or attributes, and feature trees.

Remove sensitive design data or intellectual property.

Clean and repair faulty or corrupt geometry.

Isolate areas of interest; add annotations or other 3D notes.

Translate to another CAD format if necessary.

Each of these steps assumes access to the PDM and the CAD skill sets required to perform all these steps using a seat of CATIA, Pro/E, NX, etc. This seemingly harmless workflow is another hidden cost because expensive design software and highly skilled headcount are being used for non-value-added tasks.

The concept of CAD Transformation encapsulates the entire process of preparing CAD data for design collaboration and data exchange — with the explicit goal of producing an end-user-specific (the downstream consumer of this CAD data) 3D derivative of original CAD design.

By recording each CAD transformation step into a recipe, organizations can capture and leverage the business knowledge required to prepare CAD files for suppliers and partners. CAD preparation processes can be automated, saving countless hours of manual labor, especially when designs change. This entire process is also repeatable and fault tolerant, which removes the human factor as a potential source of error. Automated CAD transformation makes sharing product design data easier, more cost-effective, and shows immediate results.

After a CAD file has been prepared for a particular vendor or use case, there are two distinct methods for sharing or distributing CAD files: asset-based and document-based. The signature characteristic of asset-based sharing is that the user accesses the solitary CAD file which has been shared via email, ftp, or file server, or the user has been granted access to the CAD asset within the PDM. This is the typical method for sharing CAD data.

Alternatively, embedding 3D CAD models into PDF documents offers significant advantages over sharing individual CAD files. Most importantly, the ability to combine CAD data with other product data sourced from other related manufacturing databases extends the amount and type of data far beyond CAD model attributes. Embedding CAD and other product data into PDF documents offers many important additional benefits:

Ability to create forms to collect structured data formalizes relationships between suppliers and OEMs and extends business processes into the supply chain.

Document-based or remotely managed security policies enable the owner of the data to grant access to the PDF file and the content within the PDF and revoke access at any time.

The ubiquitous, free Adobe Reader is a potent design review and markup platform that already exists on nearly every computer in the world.

Open, standards-based PDF format ensures accessibility and makes an ideal archival format.

As noted, changes or revisions to product designs require the re-creation of up-to-date CAD assets to share and redistribute to stakeholders within the supply chain. Due to the time and cost of preparing derivative CAD models each time a design is revised, numerous attempts have been made to automate these processes. Typically, batch processes will perform a number of operations on a given list of CAD files. Unfortunately, this one-size-fits-all approach many times produces derivative CAD assets that are too heavy for their intended consumer, of low manufacturing quality, or both. In contrast, one unique and powerful approach is the ability to uniquely identify, or fingerprint, face geometry within the CAD model and perform specific operations on these faces. In practice this capability provides a new dimension of specificity and control over CAD model processing. It also enables automated authoring of PDF-based work instructions and other types of documentation that typically require humans to create and produce.

Enlarge this picture Table 1. The cost of sharing CAD files.

Anark Corp., Boulder, Colo., and Adobe Systems, San Jose, Calif., have created a simple, yet elegant, solution that connects 3D design creation, document authoring, automated PDF publishing, and design review and collaboration tracking. By combining the power of the Anark Core platform’s automated CAD transformation, model fingerprinting, and intelligent automation with the Adobe Acrobat or Adobe LiveCycle platforms, manufacturers can automatically generate up-to-date, lightweight, secure, digital rights-managed 3D PDF documents that can be distributed to — and recalled from — internal and external stake holders across the extended enterprise and supply chain. The 3D PDF documents created with this solution can be distributed to anyone equipped with the free Adobe Reader and an internet connection anywhere in the world. Conceptually, there are five workflow stages:

Create product designs using any of the leading CAD design applications.

Author. Simplify complex CAD assemblies with Anark Core Workstation; create PDF templates with Adobe LiveCycle Designer.

Publish 3D PDF documents that incorporate high-quality B-rep product data and its associated manufacturing attributes from multiple sources using Anark Core Server and Adobe LiveCycle ES. Collect comments and markup made to distributed PDFs as the design undergoes review. Manage and revoke access to 3D PDF documents when designs change or as supplier relationships start or stop.

Consume 3D PDF documents with the free Adobe Reader. Export manufacture-quality CAD models with Adobe Acrobat Pro Extended. Add feedback and 3D comments and send or submit your changes via email or by a web service.

Regenerate new 3D PDF documents as soon as a design has been accepted and submitted to the PDM server. Because Anark Core and Adobe LiveCycle interface directly with the PDM and have access to current revision CAD models, organizations can ensure that downstream stakeholders are instantly updated with the current version of the derivative CAD model.

Conclusion

Current economic conditions and lean manufacturing philosophies have prompted manufacturing organizations to assess the value of each stage in their business, and ask stakeholders to answer critical questions about how they are adding value to the design and manufacture process. One recent Anark Core deployment demonstrated a 15x time/cost reduction for CAD model preparation. Based on the cost estimates supplied previously, the enterprise sharing 10,000 files/month could reduce expenses by 90 percent using this solution. Fortunately, many leading companies are finding new methods, processes, and solutions that allow them to eliminate waste and remain competitive by reinventing the way they perform design collaboration and data exchange.

For more information about Anark, visit: www.anark.com
For more information about Adobe, visit: www.adobe.com