Design Automation Inventor vs. SolidWorks

It is absolutely astonishing to me how much waste is acceptable within design and engineering. Concepts and workflows that would be laughed out of the building if they were applied to the manufacturing floor are altogether too common within engineering and design. This is fact. We can all choose to ignore it, but think about it. Think about how material flows through a manufacturing shop floor. Smooth, coordinated, almost as if somebody sat down and planned it all out...

Now think about how information flows through the design and engineering teams. Two words come to mind. Charlie and Foxtrot. For some reason it's acceptable to re-model something that was modeled in another file because its faster to remodel it than it is to find it. It's acceptable to download models from some website even though somebody already modeled it natively and uploaded it to the Content Center. It's common place to put configurations together that are not as cost effective as a standard alternative. Enough examples?

You get my point. Lean Design is an emerging trend and we all need to get on board with it. Lean Design isn't a fantasy and you sure as hell don't need a belt for it, it just takes commitment and common sense. 

Step one - Find waste.

Step two - Eliminate waste.

So where are areas of waste that can be eliminated through the use of technology. Lets be honest here too - technology isn't going to solve all the problems associated with waste in engineering and design. You need commitment of the People involved, a willingness to update Process, and a solid Technology strategy. People. Process. AND Technology. Without any one of those three pieces committed, design automation strategies will not be as effective as they could be.

At Autodesk University 2008 I did a class called Digital Kaizen. It was designed to be a team exercise where groups of engineers would take Six Sigma, Lean, 5S, and Kaizen principles and apply them to an engineering scenario. Since I'm the coolest guy in the world, I have uploaded the PPT for you  Download BU205-1 Digital Kaizen. 

If you have a look at that presentation you will see the stark comparison between applying what I called Digital Kaizen, or Lean Design principles to engineering and how accepted the same practice is within manufacturing. OK, off soap box. Hopefully you will find a tool or two in that presentation that you can apply toward your workflow.

So back to Design Automation (yes, I jump around). Now that were looking at engineering process improvements where can we utilize technology? Look no further than the Design Automation tools inside of Inventor. iParts, iAssemblies, iCopy, and iLogic. (see when we cant' figure out what to name something, we just put an "i" in front of it. shhhh! don't tell anyone) I'll focus a bit on iLogic which is in the box functionality with Autodesk Inventor 2011, and available for subscription customers with Inventor 2010.

iLogic is... hmmm - let me have my man Brian Hall explain. “iLogic adds a new paradigm to Inventor's parametric modeling experience.  Where iParts and iAssemblies are for variations on a configuration, iLogic is for variations on a theme. When I have a design that is solving a problem, but does so in an infinite number of ways, then iLogic allows me to add "logic" to that design which will account for each of the infinite number of different approaches to the theme of that design.  Straight parametric modeling can't address that.”

 Glorious. Allows you to create a design  where the number of configurations is potentially infinite. That's a great way of putting it. Plus, if you aren't looking for infinity - you can start a bit slower. File properties, part numbering, drawing scales, text and multi-value parameters, configure a unique UI, all of these are possible using iLogic. Did I mention its in the box?

Check out the video, let me know what you think:

Now to finish my medium coffee from Starbucks. I refuse to call it anything other than a medium just to see how many of them give me the smug "its grande". This is how I occupy my time people.

-Rob. Out.

Comments

[John Evans]

Nice job Rob. I'll just comment on all of it.
Commitment of the people involved...Sustain the new goals and not slip back to the old way of thinking. Solid advice. I definitely think that identifying the waste is the key to getting EVERYONE on board (esp management).

How much time is lost on searching for files. Can you add 'OMG' in the total?

Nice video..again. iLogic is really awesome, No more conflicting problematic conditionals and workarounds for my variations. 2011 really is the most exciting release of Inventor yet.

[Mark Landsaat]

I don't have a need for this type of automation personally, but the interface for ilogic is really cool. I like it.

[Matt M]

It's like you're channelling Denis Leary... and he's still alive (I think). :)

[Rob Cohee]

@Mark I love Denis Leary. If you haven't read "Why We Suck", it is an awesome read. Great plane ride read.

[john]

Are you saying you could not have done the same with DriveWorksXpress?

[Rob Cohee]

@John - here's what I have to go off of - http://www.driveworksxpress.com/images/videos/ProductData/driveworks-feature-comparison.pdf

See all those empty spots under DriveWorksXpress? Almost all of them can be filled with iLogic functionality. Exceptions include queued configuration generation, and working with Word, Excel (as a resulting document, not to read in - we can do that), and emails w/attachments. (Which you would need Pro for anyway)

So yes, there are many things that you can do with iLogic which is included with Inventor that you cannot do with DriveWorksXpress.

Want to pony up for DriveWorks? That's a good package that does cool stuff that we don't charge extra for. And if you need that next level beyond what even iLogic can do, we have Autodesk Intent for that.

Hope that helps - Rob