Our vision of CAD

2/22/2023

Our vision of CAD

 

The main working tools in the technical office are those used to produce technical drawings: 2D and 3D CAD. But the technical office work does not end with the drawings, but other tools are needed to manage everything from bills of materials to technical documentation, manuals, spare parts catalogs and much more.

A designer also uses at least spreadsheets and word processing, and other essential tools in the company, such as management programs and document archiving.

So far so normal: different tools are used to do different things. But we know that the technical office often uses different tools not to produce different information, but mainly to present data that it has already produced within the CAD project in a different way. For example:

- in the management system it is necessary to insert the bill of materials, which is information already available in Inventor;

- PDF copies of the drawings must be saved in the common document archive. This is also an operation that could be done automatically once the project in Inventor is finished;

- spare parts catalogue, price lists and other documentation that is managed with spreadsheets or word processors is nothing more than a re-configuration of data produced with CAD.

How to avoid these manual steps and all the work of recomposing information already inside the CAD in a different way, leaving the designer to his design work?

 

Let's see some examples with some of the solutions we offer:

 

AUTOMATIC SENDING OF DATA TO ERP MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS WITH CUSTOMIZED PLUG-IN

You have finished your CAD project. From Inventor you get the bill of materials but then you have to manually upload it to the management system. We can provide you with a custom plug-in that will allow you to automatically transfer the BOM directly from Inventor to a format that your ERP system can read.

AUTOMATIC CREATION OF PDF FILES WITH THE PDM

You have finished your project in Inventor and need to save PDF copies of the archived drawings. Thanks to our PDM solutions you can save the project in PDF automatically when you approve the drawing.

PUBLICATION OF A SPARE PARTS CATALOG WITH TO DOT SMART PUBLISH

ToDoT Smart Publish automates the tasks to read the drawings from Autodesk Inventor, preprocess the graphics and layout it in Excel, with a super easy workflow:

  • User creates a template with the structure of the catalog;
  • With ToDoT editor loads an assembly (or more), and associate the subgroups to the sections provided for the spare parts catalog. These settings can be saved to reuse for similar catalogs;
  • Then the processing starts: ToDoT processes the assembly, opens the selected drawing in Inventor, extracts graphics and BOMs, paginates on an Excel file;
  • Optionally saves the catalog directly in .pdf, or launches a customizable post-production module (for example to create summaries at the end of the file, extract information from other data sources, etc.);

Thanks to the program's ease of configuration and customization, normally you can use it right away, even on legacy data without having to modify existing designs.

Do you want to know what customizations you can make to your CAD to enhance its functionality?

Our team of experts is at your disposal to show you - without obligation - the Singeca opportunities, from the comfort of your workplace, sharing your computer screen.

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Inventor: what are the parameters?

Inventor: tangent connection or smooth connection?

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