Evan on Engineering Software

Over at WorldCAD Access, Ralph Grabowski has got a bit of a firestorm brewing with people "discussing" the difference between high-end and mainstream CAD.

In the spirit of self-plagarization, I'm reprinting (with Cyon's Research's permission) a section of a whitepaper I wrote about three years ago, when I was a respectable industry analyst. It's titled "The Value Proposition of High-End Mechanical CAD." If you'd like to read the complete whitepaper, you can get it at CADwire.net, Cyon Research's industry news and commentary site. Up until now, Cyon has charged for this paper, however Brad Holtz, Cyon's prez, tells me they're going to make the paper free now. As of this moment, the link to the paper still shows a price -- but you may wish to return in a few days, as it'll probably take that long to get it changed.

High-End CAD Software

While it’s common to talk about CAD as if it were a single application, in practice CAD software is sold as a program with some core capabilities, supported by a variety of other programs with more specialized capabilities. Today, most full-function mechanical CAD products include feature-based parametric 3D solid modeling, supporting both parts and large assemblies, as well as fully-associative 2D drafting. Beyond this, offerings differ by vendor, though it’s not unusual to see even moderately priced products include what used to be separate applications, such as sheet-metal design, mold-design tools, and class-A surface modeling.

Yet, the distinction of what is “in the box” versus what is not is less critical than it used to be, as all significant CAD developers (both high-end and mid-range) support a variety of third-party applications to fill out their capabilities. This leads to a situation, where there is substantial crossover in capabilities between mid-range and high-end CAD products.

(When using the word capable, we’re referring to the ability of a program to complete 100% of a task. We’re not making any judgment about the elegance or ease with which it does so. If it takes an expert user on one CAD program a half-hour to do a task, and it takes an expert user on another CAD system four hours to do the same thing, one system may be more productive than the other for that particular task, but they’re both capable of doing it.)

Experience has shown that gross differences in capabilities between CAD products are transitory. Over time, all strong products get better, and are capable of handling more and more difficult tasks. Not long ago, it was only high-end programs that could handle assemblies with tens of thousands of parts. Now there are several mid-range CAD products that easily handle assemblies of this size. Today, only high-end CAD products can do complete digital mockups of aircraft, or even aircraft carriers.

Fundamentally, there is a difference between the capabilities a CAD vendor might be able to add to their product, and the capabilities they choose to add to their product. It’s a matter of difficulty, cost, competition and market demand. High-end and mid-range CAD vendors, because they have different sales channels, customers, histories, and development budgets, make different choices in this area.

Consider the broad spectrum of capabilities in CAD products. There are similarities and overlaps between mid-range and high-end products. But there are also some capabilities that, as a practical matter, are differentiators for high-end CAD.

• No-holds-barred functionality. One common theme among high-end CAD products is that they are mature, and are able to handle most any type of problem. For the vast majority of users, high-end CAD products provide a complete capability. There is very little risk of investing in the product, then discovering significant functional limitations down the line.

• Breadth and depth of applications. High-end CAD products include core functionality, buttressed by a large suite of integrated applications. A seat of a high-end CAD product can be configured for the needs of its user—from basic part and assembly design, to analysis, simulation, manufacturing, and specialty processes. The result of this is that users can get the specific tools they need for their job, and add capabilities if their needs change.

• Integration with enterprise applications. High-end CAD products have extensive frameworks for integrating with other software products, including both engineering and enterprise applications. There is probably no such thing as a canned integration among CAD, PDM, ERP, SCM, and CRM—but the CAD products from high-end vendors have the hooks and middleware necessary to successfully integrate with these enterprise applications.

• Knowledge-based engineering. While it’s often a straightforward task to create a CAD model, it’s substantially more difficult to capture and account for the knowledge that goes into designing that model. Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE) allows users and organizations to encapsulate their process-specific expertise in software—propagating time savings throughout design, manufacturing planning, and manufacturing. Although it is possible to implement KBE in any CAD system that supports an applications program interface, doing so is not a trivial task. Because KBE has historically been of the most interest to larger firms, and because it has, to date, been a capability that’s often required some consulting help, KBE has gotten more attention from high-end CAD vendors than from mid-range vendors. Still, KBE is not just for large firms—it is of particular interest to any company that has a mature view of their product development process, and would benefit from knowledge reuse.
  
  Related to the theme of KBE is product abstraction. Historically, CAD systems have represented product models in a geometric form. But geometry is only one facet of a product. Consider something as simple as a bolt. While bolts may be represented geometrically in a CAD system, they are almost always specified functionally—based on their strength, cost, weight, and finish. There is a trend, most evident among high-end CAD products, to represent products at a higher level of abstraction, letting the geometric representation flow from the functional requirements. (D. H. Brown Associates, the well regarded consulting firm, has identified twelve distinct ways in which product data may be represented in an enterprise.)

• Advanced surface design. While the sculpted surfaces on consumer goods, automobiles, ships, and airplanes may have a lot in common visually, they are very different functionally—and impose different requirements on CAD software. Several mid-range CAD products (and associated third-party applications) offer surface modeling tools that can handle tough problems—but high-end CAD vendors spend substantially more than mid-range vendors do on research and development to provide surface-modeling tools specifically tuned to the needs of their large customers. In the realm of aerospace and automotive surface design, high-end vendors have a justifiably commanding presence.

• Specialty design tools. In many industries, there are common processes that are best served by specialty tools. Some of these processes, such as basic sheet metal design or injection mold base design, can be handled by either mid-range or high-end CAD. Other processes, such as progressive die design, are currently handled much better by high-end CAD, but may be eventually receive attention from mid-range CAD developers. But there are some processes which, as a practical matter, will probably remain the domain of high-end CAD products.
  
  Large aerospace and automotive manufacturers are examples of companies which need the specialty design tools available with high-end CAD. Airframe, turbine engine, and auto body design all benefit significantly from specialty design tools that are simply not available except from the tier-one CAD companies. And while the best-in-class mid-range CAD programs may be geometrically capable of handling these types of designs, they lack the fine-tuned process-related capabilities to be truly productive in doing so.
  
  Consider, for example the design of an automotive hood. It has an outside styling surface, and an inside structural surface. Any good CAD program with strong surfacing tools can design a hood (though getting both the surface quality on the outside and the structure on the inside right can take some work.) But automobile manufacturers don’t design individual hoods – they design a lot of hoods—often iterating one design over and over when moving from concept to production. These manufacturers also take proven designs, and adapt them to new projects. The best in class high-end CAD products have the capability to take a hood from one model of car, and morph it to fit another model (with both styling and structure intact) in the matter of minutes. Or less.
  
  On large projects, it’s often said that there are no “small” design changes. That’s because each change requires the interaction of multiple requirements and multiple constituents. With the design process being, by nature, iterative, a CAD program which allows for fast iterations, while preserving design intent, can change the economics of a project.
  
  Though it’s pretty obvious that the Boeings and Daimler-Chryslers of the world couldn’t effectively compete without the specialty design tools available in high-end CAD products (and, in fact, the tools were designed for them), what’s not so obvious is that much smaller companies can get a big payoff with these tools as well. If John Z Delorean started his eponymous car company today, with access to the CAD tools that the big-3 automakers currently have, he’d have a real shot at success. Or at least at building a high-quality car.

• Large/complex-project management tools. Today’s mid-range CAD products can deal with impressively complex projects. But they are rarely called upon to handle something as complex as an airliner, a complete automobile, or a full-size cruise ship. High-end CAD systems are specifically optimized for managing these types of massively complex projects in environments with large project teams. Of particular note are integrated digital product mockup tools which allow engineers to work on the smallest of details while retaining a complete-project view. (And, though not strictly a CAD product-centric issue, high-end CAD vendors have substantial experience in working with customers that do large projects, and have large teams. But this gets into PLM solutions, which are covered later in this paper.)

• Continuous innovation. High-end CAD vendors continuously invest a large portion of their income in research and development—typically well over $100 million per year, and in some cases far more than this. This is reflected in a product portfolio that is both broad and deep—and that continues to grow. Because of the mission-critical nature of the relationship between high-end CAD vendors and their larger customers, this level of investment is unlikely to significantly drop in the foreseeable future.
  
  Ultimately, when a high-end CAD vendor spends as much on R&D as the total income of a mid-range vendor, the gap in capabilities is not likely to close. Yet, the comparison of R&D spending is not entirely fair (nor is it entirely unfair), because it doesn’t account for the R&D spending of third-party vendors.
  
  Both high-end and mid-range CAD vendors consciously balance in-house development versus working with third-party developers. High-end CAD vendors will spend the money to build capabilities where those capabilities either don’t exist in the market, or where they can do better than the best-in-class. But they gladly work with third-parties when those vendors have products that would be hard to beat. Mid-range CAD vendors focus more on their core products, adding capabilities (for example, sheet metal, or mold base design) that many customers need, and working with third-parties on most everything else.

  It’s a philosophical difference—high-end CAD vendors provide a very complete suite of solutions for even the most special of needs, while mid-range CAD vendors provide an excellent product for mainstream needs, and rely on third-party vendors to handle the exotica.

Despite the significant range of areas where high-end CAD products have the lead, there is an area in which mid-range CAD products have historically been better—and that is in ease-of-learning and ease-of-use. Historically, high-end CAD systems have been focused on capabilities and enterprise productivity, with ease-of-learning and ease-of-use taking a back seat. Happily, that trend has recently changed. By the end of 2002, all the high-end CAD vendors will be shipping software with radical improvements in this area. Subjectively, we feel that the mid-range products still have a better “out-of-the-box” experience, but the improvements in high-end CAD systems may make these differences transitory.

Despite improvements across the board in ease-of-learning and ease-of-use, there is still a lot of work to do. As CAD has moved from “glass-walled rooms” to Unix workstations to Windows-based computers, the typical users have changed as well. Customers are demanding that CAD programs be used not only by trained full-time engineers and designers, but by casual users as well. And though it may be difficult to make a large and complex CAD program intrinsically easy for neophytes to learn and use, it is not impossible.