Qualified Product Concept Design Needs a Proper Combination of Pencil-aided Design and Model-aided Design Before Product Data Management

Summary Working with computer-aided design (CAD) tools is not the optimal way of working during the initial stages of new product development, re-engineering product development or production tool development. This is due to the fact that CAD programs force engineers to build the products up from exactly defined details and not from the totality of the concept down to the details. To save time and money making creative products the engineers instead should gradually proceed from greater roughness in dimensions and shape towards smaller tolerances and well-defined surfaces as the end result captured in product data management (PDM) format. An ideal engineering pathway from project start to production-ready product is rough sketching (pencil-aided design-PAD), rough physical modeling (model aided design-MAD) before different computer-aided engineering (CAE) tools are finally used.