Why are so many companies going from 2D to 3D for mechanical design? 3D solid modeling shortens design cycles, streamlines manufacturing processes, and accelerates product introductions by improving the flow of product design information and communication throughout an organization, its suppliers, and customers. For your business this means faster time-to-market and higher quality products, which translates into increased revenue, while reducing design costs will provide larger profit margins.
The main benefits of going from 2D to 3D
- Faster product design (roughly 45% faster on average) allows you to beat your competition to market
- More effective communication with suppliers/customers
- Visualize more ‘what-if’ scenarios during the design process
- Automatic flattening of sheet metal parts (with bend allowance)
- The ability to create renderings and animations for design proposals or reviews
- More effective internal design reviews
- Create effective sales and marketing content
- Simulation, test and validate your designs to reduce costs from quality problems, errors, ECO’s
- Virtual prototypes reduce the need and cost of physical prototypes
- Helps you ask and answer complex and important engineering questions earlier
- 3D print prototypes allows everyone to participate in the process
- Easily incorporate late design changes
- Test your design in the real world before moving to production
- Data management to organize and manage your design data
- Automatic Bills of Materials
- Helps to standardize on detailing and drafting practices
- Automate your design process and increase speed and accuracy of output and response to customers
- Allow non-technical personnel such as sales department (and even customers) to quote, specify and configure product whilst maintaining your design and engineering integrity
- Automatically generate 2D and 3D drawings of your 3D models
Communication Tools
SOLIDWORKS Premium software includes communication tools that allow you to share and sell your product designs. Collaborate with your extended design team, and generate sales and marketing material.
Collaborate more effectively with everyone involved in product development by using eDrawings software, the first email-enabled communication tool that dramatically eases sharing of product design information. Fast, reliable, and convenient, eDrawings files supply accurate representations of 3D models and 2D drawings created with the most widely used CAD systems on the market. eDrawings offers unique capabilities like point-and-click animations that make it easy for anyone with a PC to interpret and understand 2D and 3D design data.
Test and validate your designs
Optimize your designs by using SOLIDWORKS Simulation tools to simulate real-world conditions and test multiple “what if” scenarios. SOLIDWORKS Simulation is a powerful, easy-to-use design validation and optimization software fully embedded within SOLIDWORKS. SOLIDWORKS simulation software is ideal for engineers who need analysis but are not specialists in finite element analysis. SOLIDWORKS Motion is a complete motion simulation and kinematics package fully embedded within SOLIDWORKS software.
Computational Fluid Dynamics
Designed for engineers who are not necessarily specialists in computational fluid dynamics (CFD), SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation redefines fluid flow analysis with robust capabilities normally found in high-end programs.
Organize and manage your design data
SOLIDWORKS Premium includes a file management solution which is based on an entirely new concept. The user interface is completely integrated into Microsoft Windows Explorer®. Therefore the data management system is naturally easy to use and learn as every user knows how to use Windows.
SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional helps organizations manage and share product data more effectively and automate workflow to allow better collaboration from engineering to the shop floor, resulting in better products, lower costs, and faster time to market.
Automate your design process
3D automation enables companies to capture design knowledge, rules and experience allowing the knowledge to be re-used in order to create new and variant designs, quickly and cost effectively.
DriveWorks automation tools allow users to specify orders and satisfy customer requirements; automatically generate 3D models and 2D drawings enabling a customer to quickly ‘see’ their product aiding the sales process. Because the output is based on specified rules, results are consistent and accurate, reducing the risk of costly errors.
Download our white paper to learn more about going from 2D to 3D.
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