PRO.FILE Configurator

The VDMA (Voice of Mechanical Engineering in Germany and Europe) has established that the lead time for orders in engineering departments has increased by 35% compared to 2007. Things are unfortunately moving in the wrong direction. At the same time, nearly half of all VDMA companies produce exclusively customized products – mostly in small batch sizes.

There is definitely a need to act. You can speed up your engineering process using CAD automation – what used to take you a week now requires just one day.

CAD automation means that CAD data are automatically created. The benefit for you in the work process is that you move from “clone-and-own” to a configuration at run-time. You no longer create duplicates by copying models that can never be found again. You can free yourself from the "brain monopolies" of individual colleagues and employees.

You achieve an enormous competitive advantage – firstly, as a result of the high speed of processing orders for customized and tailor-made products – we are talking here of between 5 and 20 times as fast. And secondly, because you can very quickly make 3D models or drawings available to your sales colleagues at the acquisition stage.

The bottom line: the PRO.FILE Product Configurator makes a success of CAD automation. You can generate all the production data required for job processing fully automatically. These include, for example, 3D parts, 3D assemblies, production and assembly drawings and instructions, bills of material as well as order and master data. Your sales department will be delighted – as will your customers.

Solutions for generating production data primarily run on CAD workstations and application servers. In methodology terms, this involves knowledge-based engineering (KBE) supplemented with rule-based management of CAD systems in various operating modes. The system can also run with SAP variant configurators such as LO-VC and IPC.

The following CAD systems can be remotely controlled using rule bases – even in batch mode: Autodesk Inventor®, CATIA V5®, CREO®, Pro/ENGINEER®, NX® and SOLIDWORKS®.

The combination of a product configurator and CAD automation is known as an engineering configurator.