TDCI Inc.: BuyDesign

TDCI specializes in helping manufacturers and distributors streamline sales, engineering and manufacturing processes for customized products. TDCI’s BuyDesign® software is a comprehensive product configuration, design automation, and guided selling solution that helps companies increase sales by becoming ‘easy to do business with’. Using BuyDesign, companies also improve profitability by reducing time, cost, and errors and leveraging design automation to provide accurate engineering information at appropriate points in the sales to manufacturing process.

The BuyDesign Suite is built around a Product Configurator that serves as the central store of knowledge for customized products. It provides capabilities to enable marketing, sales, engineering, and manufacturing teams to work collaboratively to define and manage product customization knowledge. This knowledge can be accessed through the configurator user interfaces by users in various business processes including quoting, ordering, ERP, CRM, and other enterprise systems. BuyDesign also includes a comprehensive set of guided selling solutions for Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) and web-based ecommerce storefronts.

Design Automation is enabled in BuyDesign through two specific modules: BuyDesign Flex2D that enables 2D template sketches created by engineering to be used in the product configuration process, and BuyDesign Flex3D that enables 3D parts and assemblies created by engineering to be used in the product configuration process.

BuyDesign Flex2D and Flex3D work with BuyDesign Configurator and SolidWorks 2012™ to accelerate the design and delivery of configured products while reducing cost and freeing valuable engineering time. It fully leverages the power of SolidWorks to automate generation of configuration-specific 2D and 3D models, drawings, and manufacturing information for individual customer quotes or orders based on user-specified features, options, and dimensions.

BuyDesign Flex2D enables engineers to use SolidWorks 2012™ 2D sketching capabilities to create template sketches that serve as "smart" 2D models. Flex2D uses the sketches to automatically resolve constraints, dimensional relationships and configurator instructions to dynamically assemble sketches to generate 2D drawings on demand. Derived dimensions resolved during the solve process can be returned to the Configurator for use in other calculations or for use in manufacturing.

BuyDesign Flex3D enables engineers to use SolidWorks 2012™ to create 3D part and assembly model templates. These templates are used by Flex3D along with instructions from the BuyDesign Configurator to dynamically generate 3D SolidWorks assemblies, as well as detail drawings and manufacturing information. Flex3D can also read a SolidWorks model assembly structure to identify the components in a product’s BOM and retrieve attributes and data associated with them. Using this capability streamlines configurator model creation and maintenance work by leveraging the SolidWorks assembly structure and manufacturing data in the creation of the as-configured BOM.