Product innovation today is driven by an orchestration of mechanical, electrical, and software components working together as a system. So why hasn’t ECAD data management gotten the attention compared to MCAD data management with PDM? ECAD designs have gone uncontrolled in most engineering organizations for too long. It’s time for manufacturers to modernize how they manage EDA designs. This eBook shares five key ways that companies can bring ECAD into the product digital thread.
Please enjoy the summary* below. For the full research, please visit our sponsor, Accelerated Designs (registration required).
Table of Contents
- The Business Imperative to Improve Electronic Design
- The Role of ECAD and PLM in the Digital Thread
- 1) Enable Efficient Engineering
- 2) Enable Better Design Decisions
- 3) Manage the ECAD Digital Thread
- 4) Collaborate on the Full Product Design
- 5) Connect the Holistic Digital Thread
- Conclusion / Call to Action
- About the Author
The Business Imperative to Improve Electronic Design
Today’s Processes are too Slow and Disconnected
Today’s products are more hardware and software-driven across almost every industry. This raises the bar on efficient, effective electronic design to rapidly bring quality, innovative products to market.
ECAD (electronic computer-aided design) solutions have enabled great strides for individual engineers, but there is still too much inefficiency and non-value-added work in electronic design, slowing design cycles. Beyond inefficiency impacting individual engineers, current processes and tools typically lead to disconnected design efforts across teams and disciplines. Combined, these inefficiencies further slow design times and time to market, resulting in reduced market share and profit margins.
Improving Time to Market
How can manufacturers improve their electronic design processes to bring products to market faster and drive profitable revenue? We identified five keys to help.
The Role of ECAD and PLM in the Digital Thread
The Status Quo
Why are design cycles slow? Today’s status quo is disconnected processes and disconnected systems. Engineers too frequently make decisions without accurate, timely information. Further, lack of integrated design processes, ECAD systems, and electronic design data leads to suboptimal decisions that require costly and time-consuming rework. Finally, lack of ECAD interoperability limits design reuse and hampers sharing and collaboration across design teams and the supply chain.
It’s Time to Change
Companies must increase the efficiency of their engineers and engineering teams. They can’t do it without integrating electronic design data into the full product digital thread. First, engineers must have data readily available to make design decisions to get products right the first time. They should have accurate, up-to-date information in a common environment and centralized ECAD data management across teams, locations, and systems to enable collaboration and reuse. As a principal engineer for an aerospace company explains, “Ideally, I want one master system that talks to all ECAD systems, manages the whole ecosystem, and talks to multiple toolsets and PLMs.”
Electronic designs should be centrally managed across ECAD solutions. Then, the design data should be made available in a broader product context to facilitate collaboration across design disciplines and enable other applications, including AI. Unfortunately, there are no ECAD and PLM solutions available as part of a single platform. The best path to include ECAD in the digital thread in the foreseeable future is to consolidate ECAD design data, manage data from different design disciplines separately, and then create a holistic view at the product level in PLM.
Improving the Status Quo
So how can companies get the most out of ECAD and PLM investments to drive time to market? We propose five ways companies can improve processes and we’ll review each of these in detail:
- Enable efficient engineering
- Enable better design decisions
- Manage the ECAD digital thread
- Collaborate in full product design context
- Connect the holistic digital thread
Conclusion / Call to Action
Status Quo
It’s time to get beyond today’s status quo of disconnected systems for electronic design. Instead, companies should adopt centralized ECAD data management and leverage PLM to orchestrate the full design process without owning the electronic design process or managing detailed ECAD data.
We identified five ways to improve over the status quo that can help create an integrated digital thread, reduce errors, corrective actions, and rework to get products to market faster. At the same time, these approaches improve designs by optimizing design decisions early to design in greater supply chain resilience, better compliance, lower cost, and lower risk.
Enable the Change
These changes must be supported by the right combination of technology, including ECAD data management to manage multi-CAD electronic data, a consolidated component library to improve design decision-making, and integration with PLM to create a holistic product digital thread. Ideally, this would all be on a single platform from a single vendor, but that’s not the reality today.
Today, the better way to operate is to:
- Put the right data directly into the ECAD environment, regardless of the ECAD tool, to create a central source of truth for electronic design data
- Provide component library data inside the ECAD environment to provide data ranging from technical specifications to business and supply chain data
- Manage the ECAD digital thread across ECAD tools to improve collaboration, efficiency, and reuse
- Collaborate in the full product design context
- Connect the holistic digital thread in PLM
Accomplishing this required integration to support a comprehensive digital thread, with supporting details in the ECAD data management system and PLM to manage the full product across design disciplines.
Get Started
These are not sequential steps. They are complementary actions and aren’t prerequisites for each other. Choose the right steps to drive better profitability for your company, for example, by improving efficiency and time to market. Ensure you have the right technology to support the transition and consider the cloud for ease of adoption and operation. Perhaps most importantly, you should find the right partner with rich ECAD domain expertise to help guide your transition.
*This summary is an abbreviated version of the ebook and does not contain the full content. For the full report, please visit our sponsor Accelerated Designs.
If you have difficulty obtaining a copy of the research, please contact us.
