New Generation of CAD Comparison Tools Confidently Identify and Communicate Change

Tuesday, February 07 2012

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Product design methods have undergone dramatic improvements in the last two decades with the advent of the digital product definition and other improvements, but there has been minimal change in the methods used to implement engineering changes. Engineers or technicians typically overlay the old and the new parts and look for differences between them. This process is time-consuming and often has to be repeated several times throughout manufacturing and quality control. Most worrisome is the potential for missing changes which could result in making bad parts or could even cause a recall.

A new generation of computer aided design (CAD) comparison tools helps to overcome these challenges by reading native CAD formats and comparing the mathematical geometry definitions to completely catalog the differences between the source and target files. This approach saves considerable time and helps prevent potentially costly errors in identifying engineering changes. The new CAD comparison tools can automatically generate unique reports for each department within the organization that is affected by the change such as purchasing, manufacturing, quality, subcontractors, etc.