Take a car door, for example. After engineers have designed both the interior and the exterior of the door, the designs are passed along to the manufacturing engineer to make sure the door can be properly produced. If the door is to include electric windows, for example, the engineer must make sure the motor that controls the windows will fit within the door as it's designed. Someone also must ensure that mechanics will be able to get to the motor later should it need to be fixed. Today, manufacturing engineers usually build a prototype door from the commercial design and then manually place the window and the window motor between the panels to see if everything fits properly.
Prototype cars can cost millions to build.
The user grabs the window motor and tries to maneuver it between the exterior door panel and the interior panel. In fact, the ability to conceptualize a product on a computer screen has been changing the way engineers have been doing their jobs for the past several years. And innovations introduced by software companies won't be slowing down soon. For instance, Engineering Animation Inc. of Ames, Iowa, sells a suite of software called Open Virtual Factory, which allows all participants in the design and manufacturing process to work together. The software uses 3-D images to represent the layout of a factory, allowing the manufacturer to see how the factory would look and how the line would function, and to work out potential kinks right there on the screen.