Dramatically reduce design time with Tacton Design Automation!
March 01, 2018
Dramatically reduce design time with Tacton Design Automation!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Tacton
Currently, it is being used in the engineering/design department. We use Tacton with our design automation.
We have dramatically reduced our design time. Time to produce submittals went from 1-2 weeks down to a couple of days. Then, once approved, normally to produce the fabrication drawings (70+ unique parts) it would take from 4-6 weeks. We can get it down to as little as a few days.
We have gotten to a point where our main constraint is how quickly we can extract the information from the customer specification and put it into the configurator. The modeling end is so fast; it is no longer a factor.
I also feel that it normalizes the training between different skilled individuals. With the design intent captured within Tacton Design Automation, the user is then held within those parameters letting Tacton Design Automation do most of the legwork. The user can then focus on doing custom work.
We have dramatically reduced our design time. Time to produce submittals went from 1-2 weeks down to a couple of days. Then, once approved, normally to produce the fabrication drawings (70+ unique parts) it would take from 4-6 weeks. We can get it down to as little as a few days.
We have gotten to a point where our main constraint is how quickly we can extract the information from the customer specification and put it into the configurator. The modeling end is so fast; it is no longer a factor.
I also feel that it normalizes the training between different skilled individuals. With the design intent captured within Tacton Design Automation, the user is then held within those parameters letting Tacton Design Automation do most of the legwork. The user can then focus on doing custom work.
- The interface for programming and running Tacton Design Automation is directly integrated into SOLIDWORKS. Residing in SOLIDWORKS it makes it very quick and simple to program and test your configurator models.
- Creating the end GUI is streamlined. No time is wasted creating, sizing, aligning fields and other data entry interfaces. Tacton Design Automation compiles all types of fields into a uniform interface for the end user.
- Another great advantage Tacton Design Automation has is its error handling/trapping capabilities. Because Tacton’s solver is a true configurator, constraints set forth in the program will be automatically checked against other constraints and ranges to ensure all choices set by the user are within parameters. If the user chooses something outside the parameter, Tacton Design Automation will automatically present options to change other previously set choices to resolve those conflicts.
- Layout mode within Tacton Design Automation allows you to assemble many Tacton ready parts together within SOLIDWORKS and from there they will share common data between each other. This provides a way to be modular. To create and use models right away and add to as more models become available. You can pick the low hanging fruit first and go from there, not necessarily needing to encompass all parts at once.
- Layout mode is probably the most lacking aspect of the software (within Tacon Design Automation Engineer). Something so powerful as having modular parts should be more heavily supported. Although, I've heard Tacton is focusing on updating this with better functionality.
- The constraint editor does not display complex/lengthy constraints very well. I end up using Excel to visually break out in cells the different aspects of the constraint.
- Time to produce submittals went from 1-2 weeks down to a couple of days. Then, once approved, normally to produce the fabrication drawings (70+ unique parts) it would take from 4-6 weeks. We can get it down to as little as a few days.
- DriveWorks
My company initially purchased DriveWorks and I was trained. However, a year later we found Tacton Design Automation. Based on the same points mentioned in this review we left DriveWorks for Tacton. Briefly those points are: Tacton, at the time, was the only design automation software integrated (meaning the interface for programming and running Tacton) within SOLIDWORKS; GUI creation is streamlined; automatic error handling is huge; layout mode; multi-unit support.