Pratical Universal but Labor-Intensive
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
In our organization, AutoCAD is the core design tool we use to generate detailed 2d and 3d models for our current toll manufacturing setup. We rely on it to model complex piping routes and design of flanges, fittings, filling machines and more. By doing this it allows us to bring everything together in an integrated way and saves a lot of time in these large projects which we would otherwise be wasting a lot of time. As we produce a lot of goods whilst our plant is shutdown it is costing a lot, so using AutoCAD allows us to get things correct the first time and allows to mitigate fabrication errors, whilst also allowing us to catch design misalignments, tight clearances and other problems you would encounter whilst in the plant.
Pros
- Dropping in ready-made parts, as in you can pull pre-drawn parts straight out of a library, you don't have to redraw everything every time which saves countless of hours.
- Generates clean assembly drawings for the shop floor. AutoCad turns your setup into clean 2D flat drawings, so you know exactly what your working with down to every last dimension/measurement.
- Cad's native format is easy to use and basically everyone in the design world uses them, if you need a part fabricated, virtually every metal-shop or machinist or supplier can directly manufacture your part directly from your cad exports.
Cons
- I think the main problem for us, is as your 3D layout grows such if you have hundreds of bolts, valves etc., the 3D layouts can become laggy and are prone to crashing. If resource management could be done a bit better, we would be even happier.
- Poor parametric modeling: if you change the height of a tank, for example, in standard CAD, the connected pipes, flanges, and brackets don't automatically adjust with it.
- I would say poor real world physics, great as a modelling tool, but if they could add real world physics instead of exporting to ANSYS it would be great!
Return on Investment
- Performance bottlenecks on heavy projects are probably the worst negative, as layouts grow in complexity, CAD files can become heavy and slow, without strict file management discipline, design productivity can drop horribly.
- Flawless collaboration with outsiders, due to CAD native formatting you can exchange files friction free with external fabricators which speeds up fabrication transactions a lot!
- Reduced need for drawings on site, as we can model everything its faster to model and remodel than it is to test building these things and then having to take it all down due to some error that was not realised earlier.
Usability
Alternatives Considered
Assemble, from Autodesk and SOLIDWORKS
Other Software Used
Blender, Zapier, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Cin7 Core, CHEMCAD
