Parts Standardization and Reuse: CADENAS PARTsolutions featured in Desktop Engineering

Creo users no longer have to spend time approximating the design of a commercially available off-the-shelf product.

CADENAS PARTsolutions is proud to be featured in the July 1, 2013 article by Beth Stackpole, titled: “Reuse 3D CAD Models – Engineering firms are breathing new life into existing 3D CAD models as part of a greater emphasis on design reuse.” The article takes a look at many of the various options for industrial manufacturers looking to initiate parts standardization and reuse strategies within their organization.

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Article Highlights

CADENAS PARTsolutions CEO Tim Thomas discussed some of the issues manufactures face in the engineering and design process. “Companies want their engineers spending time creating the next great thing or focused on getting to market faster; they don’t want them wasting time searching for standard parts or supplier parts, because it doesn’t add any value to the company,”

Brian Thompson, Vice President of Product Management at PTC, offered insight into complimentary soultions for PLM platforms.

The combination of enhanced search capabilities and tight integration between the PLM platform and online parts catalogs like those sold by CADENAS PARTsolutions is one of the ways PTC is coming at the problem, according to Brian Thompson, the company’s vice president of product management. In addition to Advanced Framework Extension for Creo, which lets users bring a variety of standard component models into their designs, PTC is partnering with CADENAS PARTsolutions on a portal that supports a streamlined workflow for incorporating Creo models of more complex off-the-shelf components into designs, Thompson says.

By leveraging CADENAS PARTsolutions’ expertise in delivering geometrically accurate models, Creo users no longer have to spend time approximating the design of a commercially available off-the-shelf product. “They don’t have to do any work to validate the geometry, and it’s delivered right into their native CAD environment,” Thompson explains. “This can really streamline the design process.”

Mark Ortiz, VP of Engineering at Littleford Day, discussed how PARTsolutions is the catalyst behind his organizations standardization and reuse strategy.

Mark Ortiz, vice president of engineering at Littleford Day, will attest to how the integration of the CADENAS 3D parts catalog is helping the processing equipment manufacturer wrest control over its design processes. The make-to-order shop was struggling to give engineering teams visibility into a burgeoning library of Siemens’ SolidEdge CAD models — a result of slightly custom designs. Moreover, if there was a mistake in a design that was subsequently fixed on the shop floor, it wasn’t always reflected in the latest CAD model, which could lead to repetition of the same mistake.

“Because we had no control over this cloud of 60,000 CAD models, we had no idea what was good or bad, and the spare parts group who did the ordering didn’t know whether a part was in stock,” Ortiz says. “If you don’t have control, you can’t go forward.”

Now a year into its CAD reuse overhaul, Littleford Day is using CADENAS PARTsolutions’ platform to create and maintain a master catalog of 3D models for its standard parts — both internally developed and from suppliers. “It is critical for business efficiency and repeatability to have control over these CAD libraries,” Ortiz says

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