We have turned creators into managers, and engineers into administrators. And for good reason. We assumed it was wise to reallocate a small amount of an engineer’s time to administrative tasks, based on the premise that gains would be achieved elsewhere in the process through the benefits of data and process consistency. But this could be a false assumption!
While the share of electronic and electrical components in today’s products is steadily growing, the degree of integration of these disciplines into the overall product development process remains low.
This is highlighted by a survey of companies using EDA solutions from a range of providers. More than half of those questioned quoted issues such as: “the missing integration of mechanical and electrical engineering continues to be a concern for us,” and that: “we need to integrate discipline-specific development processes”.
A new approach requires bringing functionality that today is scattered around different systems, into the engineer’s environment – i.e. the CAD system. It offers agility and distributed repositories versus the monolithic approach of centralized systems.
Key topics:
- Engineering data management
- CAD & EDM for design and reuse
- PDM & PLM for process and data management
- ERP or enterprise business systems for business process support
- ECAD/MCAD integration gaps
- Product success levers
- Eliminating time-sinks for engineers