When"The father of CAD"When Dr. Patrick Hanratty invented Automated Drafting and Processing (ADAM), he couldn't have imagined that many brands would make it the core of CPQ.
Now, 40 years later, computer-aided design has dramatically increased engineering productivity, changed design quality, and enabled seamless collaboration and sharing. Now, with virtual and augmented reality on the horizon, design automation is once again revolutionizing computer-aided design.
With design automation, manufacturers of complex, configurable products can automatically, accurately, and instantly generate CAD drawings. Engineers can skip menial manual tasks and focus on innovation; Salespeople can deliver in seconds**; Customers enjoy a fast, streamlined customer experience.
Design automation is at the heart of CPQ's work. Here's why:
What is Design Automation?
Capture your engineering knowledge and intent, apply it in real-time during the product configuration process, and automatically generate CAD drawings with zero engineering input – that's design automation.
As with all forms of automation, design automation improves product quality, speed, and throughput while reducing costs, lead times, and errors. With design automation, you can eliminate engineering bottlenecks once and for all by removing the human element from a series of slow, tedious modeling tasks.
How does CAD design automation fit into the CPQ process?
For manufacturing companies that sell complex products, the design and engineering phases are often the most painful. Not only because it is slow and repetitive, but also because it is full of errors and inconsistencies.
Today, sales reps have to deal with an ever-expanding catalog of products with hundreds of options and dependencies. As a result, they often struggle to configure products that meet their customers' unique needs, leading to errors. Some configuration mistakes are simple – missing a comma or period, checking the wrong option, or writing something illegible. Other mistakes are more subtle – configurations that don't meet safety standards, or are cumbersome to manufacture.
Visual CPQ with design automation eliminates all product configuration errors and eliminates data silos between sales-engineering-production. Product rules ensure that each configuration optimizes engineering efficiency, customer satisfaction, and profitability.
In short, CPQ streamlines the entire process from engineer to order. Here's how.
Users use the visual product configurator to configure products instead of picking part numbers from the catalog. Sales reps or end customers (if you embed the configurator**) can simply drag and drop in the 3D interface to assemble the product from scratch.
Real-time compute configurable products** to allow users to optimize results within budget constraints.
Automatically generate**, recommendations, estimates, terms and conditions, and more – anything you need to complete a deal. If CPQ is integrated into your B2B e-commerce platform, customers can buy it right away.
Thanks to design automation, CPQ can generate CAD drawings as well as BOMs, assembly instructions, and CNC data, and automatically hand them over to the engineering department and shop floor to start production.
Design automation is at the heart of CPQDesign automation reduces costs, improves product quality, and delivers an industry-leading buying experience that puts competitors to shame. If you want to respond to requests in seconds and get products into the hands of customers faster than ever before, design automation is the way to go. Most made-to-order companies reap significant benefits from automating designs. Here's why:
Increase product customization options by a factor of 10 without adding cost and complexity
with"It's the same"Today's customers are willing to pay more for personalized products**. Offering more product options means more complexity on both the sales and production sidelines. This is not the case with design automation.
The built-in product rules on the backend of the CPQ solution make it easy to configure products with thousands of options. At the same time, design automation eliminates engineering complexity.
Using sales automation software can reduce the burden on your sales team
Sales jobs are stressful. Sales reps often juggle multiple prospects, manage demanding customer expectations, and sell complex products they only scratch the surface of.
With CPQ, sales reps no longer need to manually sketch complex product configurations. Let design automation handle sketches, and let sales reps do what they do best: get out and sell.
Quickly onboard new employees across sales, design, engineering, and production teams
Minimize the training required to create, interpret, and use CAD drawings. By simplifying"Design to Order"At every step of the process, new hires can get up to speed in days, not months.
Eliminate errors and reduce rework, returns, and refunds
Sales reps and junior designers can configure designs with confidence, knowing that nothing can go wrong with whatever is produced – and from an engineering standpoint, every configuration is pre-validated.
Product rules mean no errors, no rework, no expensive chargebacks, less waste, fewer rejects, and a smaller overall environmental impact.
Respond to RFQs (Requests for Quotations) faster than the competition
In a highly competitive industry, it's hard to differentiate in terms of product and quality, so which company responds the fastest to requests can be the difference in deciding who wins the deal.
If you work for a business where the configuration has to be signed off by the engineering department before the configuration is confirmed, or the customer needs technical drawings before purchasing, imagine how much of a difference it would make if you could get the project up and running in seconds.
Spend more time on R&D and innovation
Automate tedious engineering tasks and eliminate configuration errors, freeing up engineers to focus more time on work that requires real creativity, expertise, and talent.
Engineers learn how to innovate, not perform meaningless tasks. If you want to ensure your company's long-term competitiveness and retain the best engineers, maximize the time they spend on R&D.
Built for at-risk engineering knowledge and experience"Backups"
If your product rules and design intent are stored in the minds of one (or more) people on your engineering team, you're at serious key person risk. If this key employee is sick for a long time, or leaves the company, then you will have the most annoyance.
Design automation provides an opportunity to store the technical knowledge of these people in **. Businesses can take their product expertise and reuse it across the organization.
Automatically inspect and review designs to ensure compliance every time
If it takes a company longer to check a design than it takes to create it, you're doing something wrong. With design automation, businesses can automatically review and validate designs, ensuring everyone is following best practices.
If a design can't be produced with standard-sized raw materials, or has features that a CNC machine can't handle, design automation will flag it. The user will receive an error message and will be guided to correct the issue before proceeding with the product configuration process.