Product designing is affected by external factors like customization needs during designing that hampers innovation. At the same time, customers also demand a faster turnaround time which again obstructs robust and new products to be developed. 

Design automation tools like DriveWorks, help engineers create the same but different products with accuracy with accelerated time. It automates repetitive modeling and drafting tasks to accelerate engineering cycles and connects the entire sales-to-manufacturing cycle.

Factors contributing to new & better product designs

Some factors that contribute to a successful product design, and can be seen as follows:

Customization in existing designs:

A new product is, at times, a sister copy of an existing design for a specific client/customer. This happens a lot in the furniture industry. A furniture design created for an office space can easily be re-used/customized for a WFH set-up design requested by a special customer. Such customization in furniture designs has enabled engineers and product designers to come up with new and better product designs.

Including customer choices and bespoke needs

Bespoke design requests challenge product design engineers to do more in less time. It often involves an iterative process as customers keep changing their minds. The product design finalization takes time and design cycles get elongated.

Challenges in designing better products

1. Lengthy design times in customization models for approvals 

Custom requirements often come up with long design cycles. It’s not the inefficiency of the designers and engineers that make the process lengthy. Instead, it’s the approval process that delays the entire design process.

2. Iterative design process

Most of the time, changes are incorporated into an existing design model. In the absence of an efficient design automation tool, designers have to re-create the design from scratch, even if only one component is required to be changed. 

3. Incorporating customer needs 

Custom design requests from the customer make the designers and engineers often challenge the designers and engineers as the design revisions increase the chances of errors which in return increases delivery time.

How DriveWorks help design engineers?

DriveWorks software is a powerful design automation tool. Furniture manufacturers use it to build an online 3D configurator for enhanced sales and design. Below are some of the high-level benefits that DriveWorks provides to the engineers:

Logical rule-based designing and customization

DriveWorks has a fully-customized and intelligent rule-builder that enables engineers to build custom rules and even logic to automatically complete tasks. It has an intuitive UI, real-time diagnostic tools, and a self-help browser, which collectively makes rule building simple and quick. With such capabilities, engineers can easily customize designs without having to involve in repetitive, time-consuming tasks. The designs are created faster as the customization is being done using an automatic design automation solution.

Selecting designs and new options from the existing design palate 

Another highlight of the solution is that it gives you the ability to select designs and more options without switching to another design palate. You can easily control the design changes by selecting new designs and options from the existing palate. For custom requests and bespoke customer needs, DriveWorks enables engineers to capture logical rules and work on creating variants of an existing design, reduce repetitive tasks, save time, and improve the overall product quality.

Allowing customers to configure their products through a visual configurator 

Today buyers are looking for a product that meets their exact needs. DriveWorks gives such customers a platform wherein anyone can create an online product configurator and give it the desired look and feel. While designing the visual configurator, DriveWorks puts the product into a 3D environment, offering interactivity to the customers. Several design options and controls are also provided to the customer so that colors, designs, and other elements can be changed as per the requirement. It’s a great way to reduce sales cycles and bring better buying experiences.

US manufacturer saves 95% of design cycle time with DriveWorks implementation  

A US-based manufacturer of millwork needed to automate their process of data fetching from MS Access database to DriveWorks configurators. The inefficiency to populate data automatically in DriveWorks, and the higher number of SolidWorks models and assemblies was leading to lengthy design configuration time.  

TrueCADD automation team analyzed the problem and developed a fully-automated solution which resulted in: 

• Automated end to end process from sales to engineering
• Auto-mailing system to send emails to the customer within two seconds of placing the order
• Reduced sales person’s time 
• Reduced the overall cycle time by 95%

Conclusion

Engineers are expected to pass their intelligence and knowledge into the products that are developed by them. However, in the absence of an automated solution like DriveWorks, engineers also feel frustrated as they have to do repetitive tasks, leading to longer design cycles. DriveWorks gives engineers the ability to leverage the design expertise to create custom rules for auto-updates in bespoke designing. They can easily reuse the designs once created and modify SolidWorks models in real-time. Product design engineers can easily create custom products faster and ensure betterment in quality.