CAD viewers are commonplace in engineering departments. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find an engineering team that does not use one or more to avoid unjustified and costly CAD seats while gaining the flexibility to work with various CAD formats.
But none has taken the step of spreading the many benefits of visualization to a wider audience across the enterprise. Which is why SpinFire has made Enterprise Visualization easy.
What is Enterprise Visualization?
Enterprise Visualization is the emerging practice of giving entire organizations the ability to view, interrogate, and annotate CAD information (as opposed to restricting some of these permissions to core engineers).
On our website, Enterprise Visualization also refers to the bundle of solutions Spinfire offers, specifically SpinFire Insight and SpinFire Publish.
The history of CAD visualization
The evolution of Computer-Aided Design and the evolution of the computer industry are deeply entwined. Some of the earliest computer applications, dating from the late 1950s, reflected engineers’ dreams of replacing pen and paper with computerized engineering designs – strictly 2D, of course.
The need for better and more powerful CAD software drove the need for more potent and affordable computers, a major factor in the development of proprietary CAD hardware and software systems, followed by UNIX workstations, and then today’s powerful PC’s. The software could not have evolved without the hardware, and the hardware, with its exponential increase in power from ever smaller and cheaper electronics, could never have been designed and engineered without the software.
Along the way, pioneers led startling advances. Like the DAC system developed in 1957 by Dr. Patrick J. Hanratty (“the father of CAD”) for General Motors and IBM, and the work done by Dr. Ken Versprille at Computervision in the mid-70s to accurately model complex 3D surfaces.
Over the decades, CAD spurred the development of computer-aided engineering (CAE) and manufacturing (CAM) applications that complete a digital pathway from concept to production in every conceivable field of product development, engineering, architecture, and construction. Those earlier pioneers would be amazed at the power of the systems and technologies available to industry today.
In recent years, the CAD market has matured with several billion-dollar vendors consolidating and dominating the CAD, CAM, and CAE markets, and even swallowing up adjacent spaces, like Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). Companies like Autodesk, Dassault Systemes, PTC, and Siemens offer advanced products for every market niche. In response to market needs, these companies’ portfolios include very advanced products that require specialized knowledge and training to use. And despite long standing availability of vendor-neutral standards, like IGES and STEP, the major vendors adhere to their own proprietary file formats, which results in access being limited to users of their (very expensive) software.
The need for broader, easier, and affordable access to CAD information led inevitably to the rise of independent CAD viewers, including SpinFire. CAD viewers introduced the concept of CAD visualization as distinct from design, where users interact with the design in various ways but cannot modify it.
CAD in the Automotive Industry
The automotive industry was one of the first to understand the transformative potential of computerization. Perhaps due to the industry’s sheer scale, it needed to progress beyond pen and paper, not just for design but also for inventory planning, and manufacturing management, and much more. But it is the focus on relentless improvement in performance and value through elevated design that is at the heart of the world’s largest and most complex manufacturing endeavor.
The Common Limitations and Drawbacks of CAD Visualization
The major CAD products mentioned above are justifiably complex and expensive. They are designed for use by highly skilled and dedicated designers and engineers. CAD viewers provide easy access to all the information in CAD files, and should interpret them consistently and accurately, but that is not always the case.
Prohibitive pricing structure
The first problem is that viewers have traditionally been priced and sold the same way as CAD – by the seat. Why is this a limitation? Because each user needs to be individually justified. Currently, the question is, “why should this user have access?”—instead, it should be, “Why not?”
Rotating licenses
It also means acquisitions are often made on an individual basis leading to a variety of different viewers in use at the same company. And as companies control expenses by limiting the number of viewer seats, users wind up sharing access to a pool of licenses, creating a tracking and management headache as licenses are shifted from workstation to workstation.
Steep learning curves
Another problem is that CAD viewers often mimic the user interface of CAD products, which means there is a significant learning curve required. Viewers should be intuitive so that anyone can use them.
Engineers playing “Telephone”
Finally, with a plethora of incoming files and formats, and many consumers of design and engineering information across the organization, there is a need for an efficient and consistent way to process, translate, and distribute files. Too often, this task consumes valuable engineer resource time and creates an unneeded delay to information that is critical to on-time execution. And if translations are performed inconsistently it leads to errors being propagated to downstream departments and systems.
SpinFire solved these problems, and Enterprise Visualization was born
We are reinventing how the industry approaches visualization.
We have always understood that access involves ease-of-use, so a SpinFire hallmark is an intuitive user interface that requires little or no training.
Then we realized that we could provide a means to automate the processing and distribution of CAD files. We developed SpinFire Publish, a 24×7 automated attendant, that monitors incoming customer data packages and executes predefined custom workflows, called “pipelines,” to offload all the processing and distribution required. It is a digital publishing system for CAD information that is unique to the SpinFire suite.
Next, we tackled the problem of juggling and managing viewer seats by switching to a new licensing model for SpinFire. Now SpinFire licensing is unlimited. Pricing is based on the size (number of people) in an organization – whether that’s a location, several locations, a division, or an entire enterprise.
There are so many more people across the organization who can perform better, faster, and with greater insight if they have access to visualization. And with SpinFire Insight, everyone is in, which means:
- Sales has a tool for customer collaboration and markup.
- Shop floor and quality teams can interrogate models to check dimensions and tolerances.
- Marketing has access to generate 2D and 3D graphics.
- Purchasing can ensure suppliers have accurate information and complete specs.
- Executive meetings and presentations can delve deeper, faster.
With SpinFire Insight, your organization can standardize on one viewer, reducing administrative overhead as well as licensing and training costs. And with a single viewer, everyone in your organization can enjoy a consistent representation of CAD information.
It’s a company-wide solution that empowers you to communicate, collaborate and comprehend like never before—all in an affordable, easy-to-manage subscription.
The future is Enterprise Visualization
Today, there is intense pressure on manufacturers to do more with less, to execute faster, to increase the value and performance of products while reducing cost.
These are goals that can only be achieved by looking at the processes in play and the people involved and finding tangible ways to improve. Leveraging the SpinFire suite of products to become a visual enterprise is easy and affordable and yields immediate benefits.
