Longview Advisors

Longview Advisors (Loveland, Col.), in a survey of professionals in discrete manufacturing, says it finds evidence of persistent inefficiency in design data handling, even though effective technological solutions are available. The 2008 Collaboration & Interoperability Market Report includes results and analysis from Longview’s fourth annual survey, along with articles on related industry topics.

“The survey shows a large portion of companies reporting ongoing CAD migration projects,” says Longview Advisor president David Prawel. “Last year, our study showed the CAD migration market of software and services is about $5.7 billion this year.”   Another key finding in the industry best practices survey indicate that engineers are spending an average of three to 10 hours per week fixing CAD data, but only a third of them are using data translation tools. Yet, 45 per cent of respondents who do use third-party translation software indicate that the applications give satisfactory results better than 75 percent of the time.

“This brings up the question: with so many engineers spending so many hours in wasteful cleanup of CAD data, why are so few companies using data exchange tools, especially if the applications show effectiveness?” Prawel asks.  “In this age of lean thinking, why squander valuable engineering resources by working on problems that technology is proven to address fairly well?

“These are the questions manufacturers should think hard about. Decreasing manual CAD data repair would free talented people to innovate more, build better quality products customers want, and beat their competition.”

The free annual publication compiles results from Longview’s survey, containing responses from 538 manufacturing professionals in subjects like data exchange practices, preferred platforms and formats, 3D data handling and deployment processes, tool requirements matching, CAD translation effectiveness and other related topics.