Practical guide to switching CAD tools

Guide to changing CAD | Tech clarity

The Tech-Clarity study ” Practical guide to changing CA0 tools ” ” is now available. Here are the main extracts.

What if you consider that your CAD tool is a hindrance to your competitiveness? Should you consider switching tools ? If so, what should you expect? Does it make sense to convert your archived data to a new format? But above all, is the benefit / risk ratio to your advantage?

CAD has evolved enormously

A company that finds that its existing CAD tools no longer meet its needs or that they are not suited to its growth plans may have to consider changing them. In many cases, companies find that the change has had a very positive impact on their business.

Tech-Clarity conducted a survey of 192 companies. While many of the results are interesting, the amazing thing is that over time, business reasons have gained more weight than CAD tool issues;

Understand the design needs of companies

In its “Product Lifecycle Management Beyond Managing CAD” study, Tech-Clarity asked survey participants how they differ from each other. The conclusion of the study is as follows: “The dominant strategies today are very product-centric… Respondents seem more attached to finding the right product for the customer than to market factors such as time-to-market. market or costs, which previously carried more weight. Although these strategies are not seen as a means of differentiation, we believe that they are nonetheless key factors of competitiveness in saturated global markets. “

Reasons for changing CAD tools

There are many reasons for companies to switch CAD tools.

More than twelve years ago, when a company changed CAD tools, it was often to go from 2D to 3D. More recently, budget cuts have prompted change. You might think they are looking to cut costs by consolidating CAD tools and licensing.

Interestingly, this was one of the main reasons put forward at the height of the 2008 recession, but the pressure then came more from IT than from a need to cut the engineering budget. Companies making the change now likely believe that by improving their efficiency, they will reduce costs, with more resources being used and products launched more quickly.

Identifying the Right CAD Solution

What do top performing companies look for in a CAD solution? Compared to their lower performing competitors, these companies tend to look for criteria such as ease of use, software quality, and the ability to work with data from multiple CAD tools.

In addition to the CAD tool, the relationship with the supplier is an important criterion. With CAD playing a more strategic role in development, manufacturers need a supplier who is a true partner and can advise them on trends and features they should be considering. Figure 11 illustrates the main qualities that companies expect from a CAD supplier.

The best performing companies are 18% more likely than their competitors to cite the quality of technical support as the first criterion expected from a supplier. Good telephone support provides the most efficient companies with an additional resource, complementary to training, to allow engineers to quickly regain their full productivity. Technical support is provided both by the supplier and by a value-added reseller (VAR), the main thing being that engineers can easily get help.

The best performing companies are also 47% more likely to cite the criterion of market share. The more widespread the CAD tool is in the market, the easier it is to find partners and suppliers working with the same design tools. And the easier it is to tap into a pool of candidates for recruitment. Trained users require less training time, allowing them to be more productive faster.

Webinar: How to develop your innovation capacities and keep up with your competitors?

We will dedicate a webinar to this theme on April 22. We will discuss the different options to choose the right CAD tool and explore new approaches to innovation.

free webinar available on demand.