The survey covers 15 Trends - from ‘3D modelling’ and ‘2D drafting’ to ‘Building Information Modelling (BIM)’ to ‘Cloud Based CAD’, from ‘Simulation’ to ‘3D Printing’, from ‘PLM’ to Mobile Access to CAD’ to ‘Augmented/Virtual Reality’. All the categories are ranked by awareness, importance, current and intended adoption to reveal their trends and growth potential, including comparison to the results of the prior year’s survey.
“Mapping the future growth trends of your market area is vital for the planning of any business,” said Chris Turner, CEO and managing director of Business Advantage. “This annual CAD Trends survey is designed to assist CAD, CAM, CAE, PDM and PLM users and software companies with their planning for 2016 and beyond.”
He added: “Because this is the third year we have conducted this survey we are now able to show multi-year actuals as well as predictions five years into the future.”
The 2016 report found that the strongest growth potentials are in ‘Pay As You Go’, ‘Cloud based CAD’, ‘Augmented/Virtual Reality’, ‘Mobile Access to CAD’, ‘Advanced real time Rendering and Visualisation’ and ‘3D Printing’.
According to the survey, 3D Modelling has been widely adopted but 2D Drafting remains important. Two thirds of users still rate 2D drafting highly important, with 39% of design work producing 2D drawings, 27% 3D models and 34% both 2D drawings and 3D models.
CAM software usage has increased 37% in the last year. Almost 70% of those using or planning to use CAM think it’s important to have machining instructions automatically generated from 3D CAD models. 60% of them also want to see more software development effort on CAD/CAM integration.
Looking to the next five years, the report states that concurrent Engineering (72%) and PLM (67%) have good growth potential in the coming years and that BIM is showing a drop in perceived importance.
Turner concluded: “Anyone interested in more detailed analysis of the data, for example by trend, usage, adoption, region, industry or CAD software vendor should contact us.”
