Manufacturers of custom products and their design teams face the need to deliver faster turnaround times, improve personalization, and achieve higher-quality outcomes to hit sales targets without increasing costs. This is where design automation makes a real difference.
As experts in design automation, we see how it streamlines custom manufacturing workflows and opens new growth opportunities.
Design automation delivers several benefits, and in this blog, we set out our top five:
- Meet customer requirements
- Eliminate errors and rework
- Speed up workflows
- More time for innovation
- Consistent quality
1. Meet customization requirements
There is a growing demand for customizable products across all manufacturing sectors. However, the design process associated with creating CAD drawings for custom products is slow, labor-intensive, and prone to errors. Using design automation tools, manufacturers automatically generate the 3D models, manufacturing data and drawings required to sell and produce the finished customized product. This reduces design time from hours to seconds while minimizing errors and expensive rework.
2. Eliminate errors and rework
Design automation minimizes human error, leading to more accurate and reliable designs. This is particularly crucial in manufacturing, where the accuracy of custom designs is key to efficient workflows between design, sales, and production teams. Design rules and parameters ensure that product configurations are valid and reduce the amount of rework required.
3. Speed up workflows
Design automation enables streamlined workflows for faster design iterations with minimum manual input. Automating repetitive tasks reduces the time required to complete projects. This increased efficiency enables design engineers to take on more projects or focus on more complex aspects of their work. Streamlined workflows also improve the flow of tasks between departments, making sales and production cycles more efficient.
4. More time for innovation
Design automation tools take away the hands-on design engineering requirement for mundane tasks such as resizing, exporting, and versioning. This frees up design engineers from spending time on repetitive design revisions. By automating what are often repetitive, time-consuming tasks, engineers have more time to focus on more engaging tasks such as increasing throughput, solving custom design challenges, and improving existing products and processes.
5. Consistent quality
Maintaining quality consistency is essential when creating custom designs at scale. Design automation enables custom products to be manufactured with guaranteed quality standards. Design rules and parameters are built into the automation process to ensure that products meet quality requirements.
Learn more about design automation
Read our recent design automation blogs to discover how it is transforming manufacturing.
5 practical examples of design automation
Explore practical examples to see how design automation tools deliver business benefits for manufacturers worldwide.
- Automated CAD modelling
- Product configuration
- BOM generation
- Error reduction
- Free up engineering resource
Is design automation right for your manufacturing business?
Key signs your business is ready for design automation:
- Design engineers wasting too much time on repetitive tasks
- Struggling to meet demand
- Slow design and quote turnaround times
- Errors are increasing
- Increased configuration complexity
DriveWorks Solo – Powerful SOLIDWORKS® part, assembly, and drawing automation
DriveWorks Solo sits in the SOLIDWORKS® task pane, enabling engineers to configure custom products and automatically generate order-specific SOLIDWORKS parts, assemblies, and drawings.
Setting up DriveWorks Solo is quick and easy. Capture the parameters that engineers manually update in SOLIDWORKS, create forms to enter product requirements, and build rules to accurately calculate how the captured parameters should be updated.
There’s no need for complex macros, design tables, or code.
Learn more about DriveWorks Solo
Powerful SOLIDWORKS part, assembly, and drawing automation – start your 30-day free trial today.