One of the most impressive aspects of associativity, however, is how it allows shops to participate in concurrent engineering projects. In today's global marketplace, this becomes a strong competitive advantage and is part of the big picture. Associativity helps shorten lead times and gets the project to market faster. For example, mold component libraries allow shops to leverage projects done in the past. It would seem that data import should also be flexible.
Shops receive data from a wide variety of sources.
Look for software with functions to analyze the validity of imported geometry. These packages can look for misaligned objects, self-intersection, spike and cuts on faces, as well as edge smoothness and other tolerances. In addition to detecting these imperfections, the software should be able to repair, complete and improve the imported models. Having all of these modeling capabilities in a single system ensures project speed and efficiency. Other software can be too slow or unable to repair models without these tools.