B y moving to a CAD 3-D design process, Matrix Automation Group of Billerica, Mass., has streamlined its operations, according to Richard Higgins, vice president of engineering. Matrix designs and fabricates custom machinery for the assembly, packaging, and production industries. Engineering typically represents 30 percent of the cost of the job.
Design time is also probably the biggest factor in making or missing a delivery schedule.
That's because any design corrections necessitated changing every drawing individually. A fast designer could probably draw an isometric view of a part in about four hours. With the new software, it takes designers less than a minute to generate multiple views of a part, he added. Higgins said engineers formerly spent days visually checking 2-D drawings for interference or colliding parts and would still miss problems, leading to costly delays. Higgins compared the 3-D software to the spell checker commonly available for word processing programs.