CAD Visualization Across the Enterprise

Recently, Tech Soft 3D’s own Jonathan Girroir sat down with Peter West of Actify. Actify is a well-known player in the CAD Visualization market, with the company and its partners having customers in more than 40 countries. This article is a summary of that discussion, which was a part of our Beyond 3D Podcast series.

Tech Soft 3D and Actify have been partners for many years, with Tech Soft 3D providing the file readers and graphics for Spinfire, a CAD visualization tool that enables the power of 3D to be better used across departments within large engineering organizations. In this piece, we will discuss:

• The problem with limiting CAD visualization to engineering

• How CAD visualization info is useful for nearly every department

• How automation improves customer results

• Challenges for CAD visualization in the automotive industry

The CAD Visualization Problem 

The vast majority of Actify customers work directly or partially in the automotive industry. The company is best known for Spinfire, an application designed to empower engineering teams to view, edit, and translate CAD files across the entire organization. 

It’s important to understand the CAD visualization problems across a company, including the collaboration and communication issues that come with it. Peter set the stage well:

“In the automotive industry far more people than simply engineers are involved in the lifecycle of a product. Purchasing needs to spend tens, hundreds, or even millions of dollars on tooling, which naturally gets the finance department very interested.” Peter continued, “We’re talking about a customer product, so marketing, sales, and business development folks, they want to see what's going on.”

Everyone is making changes, the engineers and customers themselves give feedback on alterations via email and suddenly, you're no longer in the 3D environment. You’ve lost the ability to keep clear track of what is going on, and as Peter puts it, “You just fell off the edge of a CAD cliff:” This is where Spinfire comes into play. To fit this demand, they had to change how CAD visualization was used, how they licensed their product, and improve how their customers thought about the potential of CAD information.

CAD Visualization Across the Enterprise

With this collaboration and communication need across the entire enterprise, Actify had to change how it thought about licensing its products to customers. Traditionally, Peter explained, “CAD viewers are just extensions of the CAD System, and those are provided as individual seats.” These seats, naturally, would be given almost exclusively to engineers, licensing the minimum possible as a cost-saving measure.

The problem, as hs he previously explained, is that companies don’t want 3D visualization of CAD files only available to their engineers. Despite this, very few would be willing or able to pay for a seat for everyone in the entire company. 

The solution was clear: “Let's give Spinfire to everyone,” Peter said. Spinfire was licensed to the company as a whole and was accessible on office computers, home machines (especially helpful with the COVID-19 pandemic), and available across departments. 

The resulting impact on Spinfire users was huge. Peter shared, “It’s been a breakthrough for our customers. We have customers saying that Spinfire is the backbone of their business.”

If a picture tells a thousand words, access to 3D visualization of a product improves the experience for those across departments and the customers themselves. 

Peter explained the “Three C’s” mantra that their products aim to improve - Communicate, Collaborate, and Comprehend. Teams could now more effectively share their information and ideas, improve workflows, and work more efficiently. 

The last “C”, Peter said, was crucial for helping customers understand a product. “If you're having a conversation with a customer and you want to communicate actually showing them rather than trying to describe that edge over there and this radius, it's a lot more effective to have that joint visual experience.”

Automation in CAD Visualization

Automation is a key target area of optimization for many companies, and Peter spoke about the steps being taken to support their customers in these objectives. By setting up pipelines to automate the process of file conversation in Spinfire and directing the information where it is needed, data is getting into the hands of customers sooner and more efficiently. This process is powered by the format conversion capabilities provided by Tech Soft 3D products. By automating this time-consuming process, engineers can focus on other, more crucial aspects of their job, saving them time and company resources. 

Saving time unpacking data also increases product quality. Completion of engineering change orders is commonly expected within 10 days, as Peter explains, “If you spend the first 48 hours unpacking the data, you’ve lost 20% of the time. If we can give them that 20%, they’re going to do a better job.”

The partnership of Tech Soft 3D’s format conversion and 3D visualization capabilities has empowered people across departments to break down barriers to their productivity and collaboration. As Peter explained, “They don't have to know what the format is, what the file is. They just click on something. It works. That Tech Soft 3D software deals with whatever format is coming in and Spinfire renders things consistently so that everyone's going to see the same.” This simplification of user experience not only streamlines collaboration and communication efforts but also improves accessibility to those working in departments with less technical backgrounds.

CAD Visualization in The Cloud

Peter and Mr Girroir also spoke about a topic that has been hot for a decade and will continue to be in the near future - Cloud Migration. In their conversation, Jonathan Girroir shared the first-hand experience of seeing the new products being developed across a huge array of industries. Tech Soft 3D supports over 600 clients like Actify, adding more every year,  Mr. Girroir shared, “We’re seeing very few new desktop applications, most of the new development is almost completely cloud.”

Despite this, desktop and hybrid systems still have their place across CAD visualization. Peter expressed that it takes a long time to completely transition everything to the cloud, and in some circumstances, companies may not want to entirely. For some markets, security regulations require some data to be kept on the premises. 

While the processes for how this data gets transferred back and forth are complex and varied, the user experience is what most directly impacts most customers, and Peter explained how they are working to minimize the disruption. “The user experience is, ‘Hey, I need to see that file”, despite the complexities of security compliance. He clarified, “We're not saying that everyone's data is moving to the cloud, but the user experience is moving to the cloud.” 

While the automotive industry is rarely at the tip of the spear of these types of changes, both Peter and Mr. Girroir expressed that a new era is coming for the industry as a whole, full of potential opportunities and challenges.

Challenges Facing CAD Visualization in the Automotive Industry

One area where the automotive industry is facing challenges is in disruption to the usual timeframe of development. As Peter explained, “The timescale for a product coming to market in the US and Europe, has traditionally been three years from concept to start a production.” Now, they are competing with a Chinese company that is going through this process in 6 months. 

As with all major shifts, some companies are adapting and thriving, and others struggling. Jonathan Girroir summarized how this relates to the CAD visualization space directly:   “Because of that reduced time from design to production, these systems that you're building, these pipelines, the automation, the immediate access to visualization of your, CAD parts and assemblies is critical for success.”

While the tracking, design, and business side of these industries is done with a host of tools and methods, “The CAD file is the center of the whole digital program,” said Peter. The potential is there for all the information to be in one place, to save time on communicating and help teams launch products faster. This is the opportunity and challenge present for CAD visualization that both Peter and Mr. Girroir are excited about for the future.

It will be exciting to see what Tech Soft 3D and Actify do together to further enable CAD visualization across the enterprise.