Inspecting Under the Hood of Autodesk...
Transcript of Inspecting Under the Hood of Autodesk...
Y O U R e S O U R C E F O R A C H I E V I N G C O M P E T I T I V E A D V A N T A G E
SUMMER 2003
Inspecting Under theHood of Autodesk VaultInspecting Under theHood of Autodesk Vault
Introducing AutodeskInventor Professional 7for Design Team Specialists
AutoCAD Mechanical HelpsKrupp Canada Excel atUnique, World’s-Largest,One-of-a-Kind Designs
Morganite Cuts Costsand Cycle Time withAutodesk Inventor
Getting the MostOut of Your CAD Investment
Introducing AutodeskInventor Professional 7for Design Team Specialists
AutoCAD Mechanical HelpsKrupp Canada Excel atUnique, World’s-Largest,One-of-a-Kind Designs
Morganite Cuts Costsand Cycle Time withAutodesk Inventor
Getting the MostOut of Your CAD Investment
Involve the entire design team, incorporate existingfiles, reduce overall development costs, and go fromconcept to customer in almost half the time.
Find out how Autodesk Inventor,® a high-performance,3D mechanical design system, made it possible.Now there is a solution that helps you achieve superiorproductivity throughout the entire product lifecycle.Visit autodesk.com/inventorhere.
Photograph and rendering courtesy of Hardinge Inc. Autodesk, the Autodesk logo, and Autodesk Inventor are registered trademarks of Autodesk, Inc., in the USAand/or other countries. All other brand names, product names, or trademarks belong to their respective holders. ©2003 Autodesk, Inc. All rights reserved.
With Autodesk Inventor, the firstthing Hardinge’s lathe cut was 40%in development time.
CONTENTSV O L U M E I • N U M B E R 2 S U M M E R 0 3
6 Inspecting Under the Hood of Autodesk VaultAn army of power users descends on Novi, MI,to put a pre-release version of Autodesk Vaultthrough its paces.
COVER STORYCOVER STORY
manufacturingsolutions 3 S U M M E R 2 0 0 3
4 Keeping It Simple, Step-by-StepVice President Buzz Kross reinforces how central mechanical designers are to the division’s PLM strategy.
10 Introducing Autodesk InventorProfessional 7 for Design TeamSpecialistsHere’s a first look at the ManufacturingDivision’s newest product to boost the technical reach of the design team.
14 AutoCAD Mechanical Helps KruppCanada Excel at Unique, World’s-Largest, One-of-a-Kind DesignsFrom designing the largest conveyor system in the world to the largest ship loader, it’s allroutine for Krupp Canada.
16 Morganite Cuts Costs and CycleTime with Autodesk InventorMaintaining a competitive edge in today’s difficult business climate often comes down to demonstrating design efficiencies.
18 Why Use DWF?Why should you utilize DWF in your company?Read on to find out.
20 ALSTOM Power Uses SynergisAdept to Shorten Cycle Times, BoostReliabilityWith Autodesk Inventor and Synergis Adept aspart of its design tool chest, ALSTOM Powerstreamlines its design processes.
22 Getting the Most Out of Your CAD InvestmentAlong with product development, Autodesksimultaneously develops training coursewareto ensure you get the most from your softwareinvestments.
24 The Autodesk GalleryA design showcase of customer art.
25 Autodesk EventsBe sure to attend these important resellerevents in your area.
B U Z Z K R O S S
M A N U F A C T U R I N G
WITH THE LAUNCH OF OUR NEW digital
version of Manufacturing Solutions magazine
about three months ago, I introduced you to
the concept of PLM, or product lifecycle man-
agement, as we view it here at Autodesk. I
emphasized how crucial you, the design engi-
neers, are to the idea of PLM as we see it. One
thing we will not be doing as we move toward
PLM at Autodesk, I said, is to de-emphasize
design. On the contrary, design is central for us
to product lifecycle management.
It’s necessary to define what PLM means to
us like I’m doing here because the term con-
jures up so many associations for people. You
know, ideas like complexity, high-cost, and a
heavy drain on the IT infrastructure in your
companies.
But that’s not at all the kind of associations
that fit the PLM concept at Autodesk. Just the
opposite. We’re moving down the PLM path
in a simple, step-by-step manner that keeps
the focus on you and your engineering
departments.
You’ll be learning about Autodesk Vault—
the heart of PLM for us—as you read through
the articles in this issue of Manufacturing
Solutions. We held a gunslinger a short while
back and invited a number of design engi-
neers to join us for a couple of days to try out
Autodesk Vault. As we always do when we
hold a gunslinger event on pre-release soft-
ware, we gave participants a chance to work
on their own to try to “break” the program—
one of the areas of gunslinger get-togethers
that power-users thoroughly enjoy. But they
were also briefed on how to go about installa-
tion and set-up of the prod-
uct for their companies. One
of the things we say—and
stand behind—is that it
shouldn’t require more than
a couple of hours to set up Autodesk Vault
and show your staff how to use it the same
day.
That’s not an exaggeration. By design,
Autodesk Vault is simple to set up and simple
to use. But it’s also powerful—it gives you, the
engineer and mechanical designer, file and
document management tools that you need
to automate versioning so that you save
valuable design time and you work more
efficiently.
We heard that word ‘simple’ used quite a
bit during the gunslinger, and we were
pleased to hear it, because that’s the associa-
tion we want to create for PLM. That’s what
step-by-step product lifecycle management
means to us.
ROBERT KROSS, VP, Manufacturing Solutions
Division
Keeping It Simple, Step-by-Step
www.autodesk.com
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C O V E R S T O R Y
ABOUT A DOZEN Autodesk Inventor power users
descended on Novi, MI, in late May to spend a couple of
days in a hands-on examination of Autodesk Vault —a
new workgroup data management environment integrat-
ed with Autodesk Inventor 7 and Autodesk Inventor
Professional 7. . With titles like senior mechanical engineer,
CAD manager, and senior design engineer, these folks are
not timid about delving deep into a product to see what
makes it tick, and if possible, what gums up the works.
But that’s the nature of Autodesk gunslingers—a
multi-day event where potential users of a new product
are given some insight into the product by its develop-
ers, and then turned loose to tweak, manipulate, and
push the product to its limits. Both camps benefit.
Participants in these events get some early insight into
the product and a chance to do an early evaluation of its
suitability to their companies, and Autodesk benefits
from the feedback collected over the two or three days
with ideas for final product tweaking and future develop-
ment directions.
But Autodesk Vault wasn’t completely new to all of
the attendees. In fact, the product under its former
name of truEVault from truEInnovations, Inc., is almost
Inspecting Under the Hood of Autodesk Vault
www.autodesk.com
AUTODESK VAULT
A U T O D E S K V A U L T
manufacturingsolutions 7 S U M M E R 2 0 0 3
as old as Autodesk Inventor itself. It’s some-
what ironic that developers of the original
technology stole a few ideas from the
Autodesk playbook as they put the initial
product plan together, says Brian Roepke, co-
founder and former President and CEO of
truEInnovations and now Product Designer
for Autodesk Vault . “We looked at what was
out there in the PDM market at the time,”
says Roepke, “and didn’t see anything for
small- to medium-sized companies that was
low-cost and easy to use.”
TruEVault’s developers went for the 80/20
rule that Autodesk made famous with its
development of AutoCAD , notes Roepke, by
delivering 80 percent of the kind of function-
ality expected of a PDM system at roughly 20
percent of the cost. To do so, developers uti-
lized Windows-based SQL server technology
and focused on check-in and check-out
vaulting security.
With the acquisition of truEInnovations’
technology earlier this year, Autodesk took its
first step into product-lifecycle management
with the goal of adding file and document
management features to Autodesk Inventor.
And given that truEVault was a partner-certi-
fied product that already worked as an
Autodesk Inventor add-on and seamlessly
with Autodesk Streamline , the transition into
the Autodesk product family proceeded
without a hitch. But May’s gunslinger event
in Novi was the first opportunity for a num-
ber of Autodesk Inventor users to give the
technology a peek under the hood.
Simple and Effective
Michael Best, a senior CAD designer with
Nashville, TN-based RTS Wright, designers of
robotic technology systems, admits that he
came to the gunslinger event with no pre-con-
ceived notions about product-data manage-
ment.“I wanted to see what Autodesk Vault
could do and whether it would be applicable
to our company,” he says.“The key thing for me
was its file versioning capability. For a small- to
medium-sized company such as ours, it offers
easy-to-use file check-in and check-out fea-
tures that we could put to use right away.”
File versioning also scored a plus from
Duracell’s Bechtel, CT-based Kevin Duprey, a
Senior Engineer in the Development Group.
“One of the things we don’t have is formal file
management,” he says.“We put files in a direc-
tory, and that works for us internally. But we
need to use our files in a more efficient man-
ner. With vaulting, we could take parts in and
out from the server and speed up how we do
things.” With 30 some seats of Autodesk
Inventor in his company, Duprey also sees a
benefit in vaulting for tracking which 15 or so
users at any one time might have files
checked out. The ability to “lock out” others
from doing anything but viewing a file while
it’s in use by a designer on a local drive was
appealing.
The kind of housekeeping that goes along
with a multi-user shop is something that
Chris Lajoie, a Fall River, MA-based CAD
Administrator with Lightolier, is also familiar
with. Lighting fixture design is a true multi-
A U T O D E S K V A U L T
www.autodesk.com
user environment, he says, where one design-
er might begin a job but quickly move on to
something else and leave other design
stages to another team member.“Autodesk
Vault respects Autodesk Inventor’s project
files,” he says. “It recognizes and utilizes all
the links that Inventor files create. Most other
file-management products can’t handle
those relationships.”
Lajoie, with six seats of Inventor in-house,
admits that he and fellow designers have
found Autodesk Inventor’s built-in project file
ability to be a bit cumbersome, but not a
major issue. With Autodesk Vault, however, file
management at his company would be much
more stable, he says.
Kate Cole, an Upland, CA-based Lead Staff
Engineer with UVP, was eager to take part in
the gunslinger to see what might be new with
the vaulting technology. Designers of ultravio-
let light sources and lab products used in the
biotech industry, her company was already a
truEVault user and happy with the product.
“When we first heard that truEInnovations
might be shutting down, I admit we were con-
cerned,” she says.“We had already tried one
file-management product that didn’t perform
the way we needed it to. Then we gave
truEVault a try. It was easy to install, very intu-
itive to use, and it was truly a vault, keeping
our drawings secure, and helping us avoid
check-in/check-out conflicts. But then we
heard that the company had been acquired by
Autodesk, and we were relieved.”
As a veteran user of truEVault, Cole didn’t
see that many differences in the Autodesk
Vault product. She did note an improvement
in workflow and editing. She also had some
suggestions for future improvements.“We’d
like to be able to delete individual versions of
a file,” she says.“The database can build up
really fast. Being able to select the versions
you no longer need and then delete them
would be a nice feature.”
That request was seconded, with a bit of
Retain previous versions of your design. All versions
of a file are stored in the vault with the user's name,
notes, file relationships, and date for rapid searching
and review.
The Autodesk Vault Explorer offers a rapid search
engine so users can quickly and easily locate files
and “Where Used” information based on any criterion
listed in the property data such as part number, type,
filename, and more.
A U T O D E S K V A U L T
manufacturingsolutions 9 S U M M E R 2 0 0 3
variation, by another veteran user of truEVault,
Andrew Banchieri, a Senior Mechanical
Engineer at InVision Technologies. His compa-
ny designs X-Ray screening equipment for air-
ports.“File sizes haven’t been too much of a
problem for us so far, but they could be,” he
says.“We might go through 50 versions of a
design. Maybe the first 40 we won’t look at
again. It would be nice to be able to select
those and archive them and free up the
space.”
Banchieri also cautions potential users of
the product against being fooled by its ease-
of-use into a sloppy approach to housekeep-
ing. At his company, it became clear right
away that they needed to create file-naming
conventions that would keep the vault uni-
form. He also recommends that CAD adminis-
trators get some staff training for the product
so that it can be used as efficiently as possible.
That caution was echoed by Duracell’s
Duprey.“The vault’s information is only as
good as what’s stored in it, and how it’s
stored,” he says.“You need to take some
time to assess how to move it into your
existing workflows if you want to get the
most from it.”
The Developer’s NotepadOne of the key phrases that kept being
repeated throughout the gunslinger was
“good solid first step.” That was what Autodesk
wanted to hear because Autodesk Vault is
meant to be exactly that—a simple-to-install,
easy-to-use file-management environment
that moves users in the direction of low-cost,
easy-to-maintain product lifecycle manage-
ment. The feedback, such as the need for ver-
sion archiving or deletion and the need to
scale up the number of simultaneous users,
was considered valuable input by the
Autodesk development team.
And now that the gunslingers have had
their time with the product, subscribers to
Autodesk Inventor Series 7 will be next on tap,
as Autodesk Vault is made available at no-cost
to Autodesk Inventor Series and Autodesk
Inventor Professional Subscription Program
customers.
Autodesk Vault is just a first step, admits
the Autodesk team, but a crucial one for
Autodesk PLM.
Users can easily manage Autodesk Inventor files
within the Autodesk Vault.
A U T O D E S K V A U L T R E S P E C T S
A U T O D E S K I N V E N T O R ' S P R O J E C T
F I L E S , R E C O G N I Z I N G A N D U T I L I Z -
I N G A L L T H E L I N K S T H A T A U T O D E S K
I N V E N T O R F I L E S C R E A T E .
— CHRIS LAJOIE, LIGHTOLIER, FALL RIVER, MA
AUTODESK INVENTOR IS A POWERFUL
TOOL to have on any design team. Whether
you’re a part designer or someone who works
with assemblies of thousands of parts, you can
do most of the 3D modeling you need to do
with this product.
Autodesk has thought of Inventor as a
“technology platform,” says Amy Bunszel, the
Product Manager for Autodesk Inventor
Professional 7—a new product released this
summer. Autodesk Inventor Professional helps
manufacturers optimize their design groups
by providing every member of the team with
the key tools they need to get their job done.
“At some point on a typical design team,” says
Bunszel,“a team member might need a spe-
cialized application for completing a particular
portion of the design, such as pipe routing, for
example. A complex assembly might involve
pipes of varying diameters and the different
pipes might be associated with pressure levels
they can safely handle.”
Bunszel notes that when this happens now,
Autodesk Inventor users typically go to a
third-party program for their specialized
needs, which can be expensive and can also
require learning a new interface and changing
the way the designer thinks about the design.
The scenario changed this summer when
the Manufacturing Solutions Division intro-
duced Autodesk Inventor Professional 7.
Autodesk Inventor Professional 7 combines all
of the applications found in the Autodesk
Inventor Series together with a collection of
specialized applications for key members of
the design team. One of the first applications
built into the product is 3D piping.
Developed in-house, it enables users to build a
Introducing Autodesk Inventor Professional 7 for Design Team Specialists
www.autodesk.com
T E C H N O L O G Y F O C U S
AUTODESK INVENTOR PROFESSIONAL
T E C H N O L O G Y F O C U S
manufacturingsolutions 11 S U M M E R 2 0 0 3
library of pipes that span size and load
requirements. The piping models have the
intelligence to consider design rules such as
“do not use any pipe with a 45 degree slant.”
And the models are also associative so that
when larger or smaller components are con-
nected to them in an assembly, the pipes auto-
matically make the necessary size adjustments.
In upcoming releases of Autodesk Inventor
Professional , notes Bunszel, in addition to in-
house development, the company will be
leveraging acquired technology. The Linius
Technologies assets acquisition is a good
example. The specialized 3D cabling and wire
harness design and documentation capabili-
ties that it brings to customers are a perfect fit
with the Autodesk Inventor Professional devel-
opment strategy.
Without tipping her hand toward naming
off future offerings, Bunszel indicates that a
goal of Autodesk Inventor Professional is to
enable the design team to handle many spe-
cialized requirements such as cable and wire
harness design and schematic diagramming,
without having to purchase additional appli-
cations. And with technology such as vaulting
and file management, acquired with the
truEInnovations assets acquisition, our goal
with Autodesk Inventor Professional is to take
the power of such assets further, such as scal-
ing up for use in large companies with heavier-
weight vaulting needs.
In case you’re doing mental calculations
and noting that the total costs of Autodesk
Inventor Professional could make a prohibitive
dent in your company’s budget due to the
costs of each specialized application, don’t
overwork your calculator. The Autodesk
Inventor Professional team has worked from
what they’re calling a “perceived value” pricing
model to arrive at a reasonable price for the
product.“In general, you can think of Autodesk
Pipe models are associative and intelligent, automati-
cally adjusting to fit different sized components and
pressure requirements.3D wire harness design, utilizing industry-leading
technology from the Linius Technologies acquisition,
will soon be a part of the Autodesk Inventor
Professional user’s tool chest.
T E C H N O L O G Y F O C U S
www.autodesk.com
Inventor Professional as the cost of Autodesk
Inventor Series plus that of one or two special-
ty applications,” says Bunszel.“We want to
deliver a larger palette of applications to man-
ufacturers, but we also want to contain the
price and build-in the kind of value you
couldn’t equal with separate add-ons.”
Design team specialists—the people
responsible for the power train of a project or
electromechanical modeling—will now be
able to keep their part of the design on the
same Inventor platform utilized by their more
generalist team members. The efficiencies this
will bring to the team in time saved and learn-
ing curves shortened will translate into the
kind of ROI no company can afford to ignore.
“We’ve got a lot in store for Autodesk
Inventor Professional ,” says Bunszel.“We’ll be
revealing more of it this summer, so stay
tuned.”
Autodesk Inventor Professional allows full control of
tubing and piping through the usage of styles.
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YOU MAY NOT TRAVEL TO CHILE that often,
but if you were to go there and visit a mine
about 200 km north of Santiago, you’d
encounter the Los Pelambres copper mine
and be able to see first-hand one of the
largest, most complex conveyor systems in the
world. Conveyors run from the open-pit mine
site at 3,200 meters above sea level to the
concentrator site 11 km south and at a drop in
altitude to 1,600 meters. Twelve kilometers of
the conveyor had to be designed to run
through a tunnel in a mountain, and the total
installed power is 25,000 Kw.
You can bet that this project presented
quite a design challenge to Krupp Canada,
specialists in behemoth-sized materials han-
dling machines. But according to Senior
Mechanical Engineer Baird Nielsen, a 13-year
vet of the company, Krupp has built its reputa-
tion on executing such one-of-a-kind design
challenges. Such tasks have become almost
routine.
Take for example a double roll crusher—
or in layman’s terms, a rock crusher—the com-
pany recently designed. It can reduce 14,000
tons of rock an hour from chunks greater than
3 meters in size to about sixteen inches in size.
That’s a record over their first double roll
crusher, designed by Krupp in 1992, which
could handle 4,600 tons of rock an hour.
The design/build costs of these multiyear
projects typically run anywhere from
$6,000,000 to $80,000,000 in U.S. dollars, notes
Baird. As the largest material-handling design
company in the world, the company considers
design efficiency a premium and has chosen
AutoCAD Mechanical as its workhorse design
tool. Krupp Canada has 25 seats of AutoCAD
Mechanical 6, which it utilizes for all phases of
design except structural analysis.
“We utilize AutoCAD Mechanical quite a
lot,” says Baird.“When we installed it, we were
able to get rid of a lot of LISP routines because
it had so much functionality built-in—things
like nuts, bolts, shapes, and edit tools. It’s pret-
ty much foolproof. Things go in on the right
layers at the right scale; text comes in at the
right size. From a CAD management point of
view, it’s easy to set up a standards template
and have people use it—which means consis-
AutoCAD Mechanical Helps KruppCanada Excel at Unique,World’s-Largest, One-of-a-Kind Designs
W E U T I L I Z E A U T O C A D M E C H A N I C A L
Q U I T E A L O T . W H E N W E I N S T A L L E D
I T , W E W E R E A B L E T O G E T R I D O F A
L O T O F L I S P R O U T I N E S .
B E S T P R A C T I C E S
manufacturingsolutions 15 S U M M E R 2 0 0 3
tency between drawings. From a design point
of view,” he continues,“AutoCAD Mechanical
saves an incredible amount of time. And the
BOM is quite useful.”
Krupp handles all of the design and engi-
neering for these projects, which are built by
various other groups. The company has
worked on about 6,000 such “unique” projects,
some of the larger ones requiring three or four
project managers and a cycle time of two or
more years. Some 35 mechanical and structur-
al engineers and designers work in Krupp’s
field office of Calgary, Canada, where Nielsen
is based. Krupp’s parent company, headquar-
tered in Germany, has other field offices in the
U.S., South America, Australia, South Africa,
and India.
Krupp Canada’s Business Challenge> REDUCE DESIGN AND ENGINEERING TIME.
> REDUCE COSTS OF DESIGN.
THE SOLUTION: implementing AutoCAD
Mechanical. Doing so, Krupp Canada
> Saved design time.
> Kept all views, annotation balloons, and BOM
always synchronized.
> Reduced errors by automating repetitive tasks.
> Achieved faster design changes.
BOTTOM LINE, Krupp Canada
> Realized a 20 percent reduction in design time.
> Enjoyed a 20 percent increase in productivity.
Krupp Canada has a reputation for designing "largest
of its kind" equipment, such as this ship loader, the
largest on the West Coast of the U.S.
View AutoCAD Mechanical
Technical Demonstration
C U S T O M E R S U C C E S S E S
Morganite Cuts Costs and Cycle Time with Autodesk Inventor
www.autodesk.com
DUNN, NC-BASED MORGANITE, INC., is a
subsidiary of The Morgan Crucible Company
headquartered in Windsor, UK. Founded in the
late 1800s and now with 150 companies oper-
ating in 35 countries, The Morgan Group is a
world leader in supplying carbon brushes and
brush tube assemblies for automotive and
industrial applications. Each time you start up
your car, raise or lower power windows, vacu-
um a carpet, turn on a blender, or run a lawn-
mower, you are very likely using the kind of
brushes and commutator components that
Morganite produces.
However, being a world leader in the manu-
facture of these components doesn’t mean
there’s no competition to worry about.
According to Shepard Hockaday, Morganite’s
Vice President of Engineering and New
Product Development,“Even though our
product is equal to or better than our
competition’s, high tooling costs and long
cycle times have been a problem.”
To address the problem of rising costs and
lengthening cycle times, Morganite recently
utilized Autodesk Inventor as it went after a
lucrative project. A major automotive company
needed a new type of commutator designed
and prototyped during a very small window of
time. The company gave Morganite two weeks
from its first look at the design needs to come
up with a proposal. Using Autodesk Inventor
they were able to put together the proposal
and to show that they could deliver a proto-
type in 29 days as opposed to the eight weeks
that such a design-to-prototype project would
typically take.
Morganite won the contract—the biggest
in its history—and was able to cut its design
cycle by 50 percent and its production costs
by 20 percent. The results had a profound
impact on Morganite’s business relationship
E A C H T I M E Y O U S T A R T U P
Y O U R C A R , R A I S E O R L O W E R
P O W E R W I N D O W S , V A C U U M A
C A R P E T , T U R N O N A B L E N D E R ,
O R R U N A L A W N M O W E R , Y O U A R E
V E R Y L I K E L Y U S I N G T H E K I N D O F
B R U S H E S A N D C O M M U T A T O R
C O M P O N E N T S T H A T M O R G A N I T E
P R O D U C E S .
manufacturingsolutions 17 S U M M E R 2 0 0 3
C U S T O M E R S U C C E S S E S
with the automotive client.“They were so
impressed that they came back and asked us
to do three more projects,” says
Manufacturing Engineer Mon Vonkchalee.
DWG Compatibility and Ease of UseMorganite’s transition to Autodesk Inventor
was relatively painless because of Inventor’s
compatibility with DWG files and its ease-of-
use. Morganite has been a long-time user of
Autodesk products and had many 2D legacy
drawing files that needed to be utilized in its
design. Autodesk Inventor’s ability to use
spreadsheets to drive and modify designs
meant that decades of intellectual data were
preserved and moved forward. But much of
the reduction in cycle time that Autodesk
Inventor helped Morganite engineers achieve
also stemmed from the product’s ability to
eliminate the need for engineers to re-create
designs from 2D paper drawings. This allowed
them instead to work directly from three-
dimensional models. The greater accuracy of
the 3D models meant less human-error and
more costs savings, says Hockaday.“We’re talk-
ing reduced scrap, reduced time by which to
train employees, and just overall higher quali-
ty product.”
In addition to the after-contract costs and
time reduction, Morganite applauds the visu-
alization capabilities of Autodesk Inventor,
which helped the company land its lucrative
automotive contract in the first place. This was
an area of the product that first caught their
attention as they worked with Autodesk
reseller Cadre Systems. Inventor allows the
creation of animated models that can be
played on any desktop PC through a media
player.“We’ve found this to be the best-selling
tool we have,” says Vonkchalee.
According to Richard Morsch, Director of
Operations in the Commutator Division,
Morganite’s initial investment in Autodesk
Inventor paid for itself in just two months. The
company is now considering Autodesk
Inventor for the Morgan Group’s other loca-
tions.“I think it will help us integrate our dif-
ferent factories so that we are doing things in
the same manner around the globe,” he says.
“It has opened up a new group of customers
for us and a whole new product market.”
For more information on Morganite Inc.’s
products and services, go to
www.morganite.com.
Morganite is a world leader in the design and manu-
facture of carbon brushes, brush assemblies, and com-
mutator components used in the automotive industry.
View Morganite Online Video Low | Med | High
View Autodesk InventorTechnical Demonstration
T E C H N O L O G Y F O C U S
www.autodesk.com
Why use DWF?
For every one of you who creates a design,
there are 10 or more people who need to view
your design work, some of whom have little
CAD expertise. DWF file format enables small-
footprint creation and distribution of designs
in a format easily “consumed” by people
downstream.
What’s the history of DWF?
When DWF was first being developed six or so
years ago, PDF was in its infancy. In both cases,
researchers were working on a way to save
files in a compressed format for easy viewing
via use of viewers on PCs and via the Web. In
the case of DWF, Autodesk created a format
that would take advantage of true design data
and produce a format that would allow view-
ing, markup, and plotting to scale, all with free
viewing technology.
Does DWF eliminate the need for paper?
DWF makes no attempt to eliminate paper; it
merely rearranges where paper might be nec-
essary. Take a complex mechanical assembly,
for example. You might work on a design, then
print out paper copies of the design work, and
distribute them via FedEx or some other mail
service to team members at another location
at a remote manufacturing facility. Such paper
printing and shipping can incur quite a bit of
costs. DWF allows the same design material to
be saved to a compressed file format and digi-
tally distributed to your team. Team members
might then decide to create paper printouts,
but that’s up to them. They could also rely pri-
marily on their digital DWF copies for sending
markups and comments back to you or anoth-
er project member. You are obviously going to
save on shipping costs, but a big ROI here is
the reduction in cycle time and cutting out
many of the construction errors associated
with longer cycle times.
AUTODESK DEVELOPED THE DESIGN WEB FORMAT™, or DWF™ file, some six years ago now.
Originally called “Drawing Web Format ,” the product has changed markedly over its relatively
short life and will be the repository of substantial R&D effort going forward, according to
Autodesk’s Tony Peach, Director of Viewer and DWF Strategy. The technology allows you to save
your design work in a view, Web, and print-ready format for sharing with team members and oth-
ers inside or outside of your company who might need to view and mark-up scalable, plottable
design files. There are some ambitious development plans on the table for DWF, so here’s a Q&A
look at this technology tracing its roots and outlining its future.
Design Web Format Q&A
T E C H N O L O G Y F O C U S
manufacturingsolutions 19 S U M M E R 2 0 0 3
How is DWF different from PDF;
which is better?
PDF has its place and works very well for 8 1/2
by 11 written documents, spreadsheets, and
the like. However, if you want to deal with an
E-size drawing, for example, and still maintain
measurable accuracy, PDF does a poor job of
this, but it’s what DWF was created for. In
addition, you can save multiple drawing sets
into one DWF file and those documents can
be printed out without the necessity of addi-
tional plotting files. Creating DWFs is free,
viewing them (with Autodesk Express Viewer)
is free, and printing vector-based files is accu-
rate and trouble free. DWF continues to have a
considerably smaller footprint than PDF.
What is the future of DWF?
We’ve made a decision to devote substantial
resources to growing and improving DWF. As
of the AutoCAD 2004 and Autodesk Inventor 7
releases, most of our products publish to the
new multi-sheet DWF 6.0 file—all other prod-
ucts will include this support within the year.
The technology, both the DWF toolkit and the
Autodesk Express Viewer (APIs and developer
kit) will remain open and free and available to
outside developers for inclusion in their tech-
nology. With the recent release of Volo View 3,
you are able to view, redline, and markup
multiple sheets saved to one DWF file. As we
move forward with our development strategy,
we will dramatically improve publishing
capabilities from within every Autodesk
Design tool as well as enable you to have the
capability to include much richer data—
such as metadata, 3D, animations, and so on—
within a DWF file.
For information on DWF, Autodesk
Express Viewer, and Volo View,
visit the following Web sites:
www.autodesk.com/dwf
www.autodesk.com/viewers
DWF allows you to publish multi-page drawing sets
to one DWF file. The recipient can then plot one or
all of the drawings in the set without the need for
plot files beyond the DWF.
B E S T P R A C T I C E S
ALSTOM Power Uses Synergis Adept to Shorten Cycle Times, Boost Reliability
www.autodesk.com
A WORLD-LEADING MANUFACTURER of
steam condensers for the power industry,
ALSTOM Power Inc., Heat Exchange Division,
operates in a competitive industry that stress-
es quality products brought to market in ever
decreasing cycle times—it’s a familiar story.
Meeting these market demands, however,
under such competitive constraints is no small
challenge.
One of the ways Easton, PA-based ALSTOM
rises to the challenge is through its design
tools, says Dave Breiner, the company’s
Supervisor of Drafting and CAD. ALSTOM uses
Autodesk Inventor to design its steam con-
densers as 3D models.“We chose Autodesk
Inventor because its parametric capabilities
allow us to create ‘base model’ assemblies,” he
says.“We can quickly generate these models
by filling in key dimensions and variables in an
Excel spreadsheet. The base models are then
further developed to reflect each individual
design. More importantly,” says Breiner,“the
completed model allows us to visualize the
complex internal components of our
condenser to check for alignment, fit, and
interferences.”
But ensuring the quality and reliability of
designs is just part of the challenge ALSTOM
faces in order to achieve a competitive edge.
Also crucial is the effective management of
multiple copies and versions of an assembly
during the product-development cycle—a
task for which ALSTOM designers rely on the
capabilities of Synergis Adept.
In a recent situation, three employees had
to model a complete condenser in order to
run a finite element analysis, Breiner explains.
“Each modeler had a particular section to
model, then had to sign in all the parts and
assemblies into the Synergis Adept document-
management system. At the end of the proj-
ect, we assembled the entire condenser using
Adept to pull all the assemblies and parts
together. Adept helped us succeed with this
project,” he says,“by handling and tracking all
the relationships of parts, assemblies, and
drawings.”
Before implementing Synergis Adept to
manage the design process, drawings were
stored on ALSTOM’s network. When drafters
B E S T P R A C T I C E S
manufacturingsolutions 21 S U M M E R 2 0 0 3
needed to find a drawing, they would go to
the folders on the network and start work on a
particular drawing without being confident
whether it was approved, being revised, or
even completely up-to-date, notes Breiner.
With the active development environment
necessary to ALSTOM’s success, tracking
revisions and maintaining project control
is crucial.
The decision to move to Synergis Adept,
which the company made in 1997, was immi-
nently logical, given that the product worked
seamlessly with AutoCAD and Autodesk
Mechanical Desktop —ALSTOM’s primary
design software at the time, and now more
recently with Autodesk Inventor. And imple-
menting the 23 licenses necessary for
ALSTOM’s projects took just more than a
week. After an in-house demo of only a few
hours, ALSTOM staffers were able to begin
using Adept immediately.
Another strength of Adept and one impor-
tant to ALSTOM’s business is that the program
helped ALSTOM conform to ISO regulations.
And now the product is helping the company
ensure that division staff outside of design
and drafting also have access to important
data.“With all of our drawings in electronic
format,” says Breiner,“we no longer have to
produce a set of hardcopy drawings to store
for record or to use as ‘go-bys.’ Every drawing
that we create is immediately available at our
desks using the built-in 2D/3D viewer in
Adept. Now people throughout our company,
such as Manufacturing, Quality Control, and
Marketing have access to the most current
documents so they can have their questions
answered with a few mouse clicks.”
For more information about ALSTOM Power
Inc., Heat Exchange Division, go to
www.alstomenergysystems.com.
For more information about Synergis Adept,
go to www.synergis-adept.com.
This image depicts an ALSTOM "TPND Axial
Condenser."
This image depicts an ALSTOM "TPVD Down
Condenser."
T R A I N I N G A N D E D U C A T I O N
Getting the Most Out of Your CAD Investment
www.autodesk.com
IN THE PAST 20 YEARS, technology
advances have upped the ante with every
passing year on the skill-level that you design-
ers and mechanical engineering professionals
are expected to master. And that’s just to be
moderately productive, never mind the
amount of knowledge required to achieve
expert status and maximum productivity. For
the past two decades, Autodesk, as one of the
key leaders in developing design technology
for the desktop, has admittedly added to your
knowledge requirements by producing
increasingly sophisticated software tools that
are needed to help you tackle the thorniest
design issues. This is especially true in the
complex areas of manufacturing and mechan-
ical design.
If Autodesk stopped at just delivering tech-
nology and left you to your own devices, the
situation would be problematic at best. Third-
party trainers and educators would need to
first learn the technology themselves and
then rush to help you achieve proficiency,
which would obviously not be an efficient
means of knowledge transfer. It is with your
efficiency in mind and awareness of how
important it is to you to see a speedy return
on your investment dollars that Autodesk is
committed to developing training materials
and courseware to help you shorten the learn-
ing curve and maximize your productivity.
“Typically, without going through any train-
ing, a new user of CAD technology utilizes
about 25 percent of the product’s power,” says
Rak Bhalla, Autodesk Technical Marketing
Manager.“But with well-designed training,
much more of the product’s features and
capabilities are highlighted in a way that helps
users become more productive much faster.”
Courseware for All Training
Environments
Autodesk develops courseware for use by its
resellers in their training programs, as well as
by CAD specialists at technical schools and
colleges. Courseware is also available for self-
paced instruction, from introductory to more
advanced material. And if your internal train-
ing department wants to launch full-scale
internal training, Autodesk courseware sup-
ports that approach as well. But when possi-
ble, Autodesk recommends that you take
instructor-led training through the reseller
channel because reseller training focuses on
exactly what you need.
“The first choice for training should always
be a reseller,” says Bhalla.“Autodesk works
very closely with the reseller channel to
ensure that courseware and training are made
available to them as part of any major release.
That way, resellers are always up-to-date with
the latest materials and have first-hand experi-
T R A I N I N G A N D E D U C A T I O N
manufacturingsolutions 23 S U M M E R 2 0 0 3
ence with the new courseware
materials.”
This same material that re-
sellers draw upon is made avail-
able to commercial customers,
technical schools, and colleges
so that trainers from all areas have consistent
specialized curricula from which to draw.
An Autodesk Courseware Sampler
As an illustration of timely courseware,
Autodesk only recently acquired the assets of
VIA Technology and its wiring and diagram-
ming technology. But you can already take a
two- to three-day course in VIA Wiring
Diagram Fundamentals. The course focuses on
how to build intelligent ladder diagrams and
panel layouts and how to leverage this intelli-
gence. After completing the course, you will
be able to easily navigate the interface, build
ladder-wiring diagrams, extract basic electrical
reports, including BOMs and PLC reports, and
create an electrical controls AutoCAD tem-
plate drawing.
In fact, the Autodesk Inventor courseware
recently won awards of excellence and merit
from the Society for Technical Communication
for 2002-2003.
Other new courseware topics include
migrating from AutoCAD, Mechanical Desktop,
or Pro/ENGINEER to Autodesk Inventor;
Autodesk Inventor Installation
and Setup; AutoCAD Mechanical
2004; and Autodesk Inventor
Essentials, Levels I and II.
These courses focus on new
users as well as existing
software product users.
To help resellers reduce their preparation
time and focus on delivering more training
courses, Autodesk develops instructor materi-
als, so that the entire course is easy to use. In
addition, student workbooks with tutorial CDs
and many supporting exercises are used to
reinforce classroom instruction.
Whether you get your training through a
local high school, college, authorized
Autodesk training center or reseller, the crucial
thing, notes Bhalla, is that you don’t undercut
the maximum value of using technology by
overlooking the need to invest in training.
“Customers realize ROI on their software
investments much more quickly by ensuring
that designers and internal staff are well
trained to work to maximum efficiency,” says
Bhalla.“Our charter is to create the best mate-
rials and training support possible to help cus-
tomers achieve that goal.”
For more information about reseller training
and Autodesk training courseware, go to
www.autodesk.com/training.
R E A D E R S ’ G A L L E R Y
www.autodesk.com
PORTFOLIO
Send us an image you created in
Autodesk Inventor or AutoCAD
Mechanical software.
For consideration, simply submit an
email with "Manufacturing Solutions
Gallery Image" in the subject line to
Please include your name, your
company name, a brief description of
the design, the software used and an
image in JPEG, BMP or TIFF format.
Join Your Colleagues in The Gallery
The models displayed in this issuewere created by students atPennsylvania College ofTechnology in Williamsburg,Virginia using Autodesk InventorV6 in a Design forManufacturability class whichconcentrates on freeform model-ing techniques.Assistant Professor J.D. Mathersubmitted a number of creativeand well executed designs by hisstudents—unfortunately we werelimited in space.
C U R R E N T E V E N T S
manufacturingsolutions 25 S U M M E R 2 0 0 3
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Manufacturing and Infrastructions Solutions. This new generation
of products and services were designed to help you create, share,
and manage digital design data throughout a project's lifecycle
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Each year Autodesk and our partners sponsor
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All material copyright © 2003
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