Cut Design Time by 60% and Product Development by 20%

What if? is the question that fuels innovation.

The journey from a need to an idea to a product is driven by curiosity and guided by experience. Marc McCauley and Jesse Hahne, co-founders of the Center for Advanced Design, love solving difficult product development problems. Their combined experience of bringing over 1,700 products to market informs every decision they make in design, engineering, prototyping, and production.

Envisioning Fewer Redos

Before standardizing on the 3DEXPERIENCE® Works platform, the Center for Advanced Design used various design tools. Alias® and Rhino® surfacing packages for industrial design, and SOLIDWORKS® 3D CAD software for most everything else.

The lack of integration was killing them.

“With Alias and Rhino, changing the surfacing geometry to resolve performance or manufacturability issues meant we had to redo a lot of work,” says McCauley. “We’d have to start over, creating new surfacing geometry that reflected the design change, and then bring the new surface geometry into SOLIDWORKS.”

The company desired a better, cleaner approach for integrating industrial and mechanical design tools as well as a single platform that would make it easier to collaborate as a team.

Saving Time in Spades

3DEXPERIENCE Works proved to be the browser-based solution they were looking for, plus it functions seamlessly with SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD software, which made adoption a no-brainer.

“The 3DEXPERIENCE Works portfolio gives us access to industrial design, mechanical design, simulation, motion visualization, rendering, data management, production, and communication tools that we need to continue to develop innovative products that help our clients succeed,” says McCauley. Gone were the days of jumping back and forth between applications.

The company soon learned it was far more efficient to use the cloud-based environment with SOLIDWORKS to accelerate product development. “The 3DEXPERIENCE Works solutions have enabled us to cut industrial design time by 60 percent, which gives us time to create more concepts, and to shorten the entire product development cycle by 20 percent,” states Hahn.

More Efficient—Naturally

“The ability to take a product from concept through production all from within the same cloud-based environment is naturally more efficient,” McCauley notes. “With the flexibility of using the 3DEXPERIENCE Works tools from inside a web browser we’ve become a lot more agile.”

The Center for Advanced Design believes that working in an integrated design environment in the cloud represents the future of product development because it provides the flexibility and freedom to work anywhere and at any time, which is a lot more efficient—it’s a win-win for everyone involved.