Oh, say

Oh, Say, Can You See?...
by Wayne A. McClelland

Or I guess with two eighth notes, it’s "Oh-oh". Anyway -- "there on sheet four in the front orthographic view you can see the mounting hole, countersunk in the boss that’s flush with the rim of the recessed bottom of the housing and, as is clear in the top view, supported by four tapered ribs". Now with a bit of finger pointing and good dashed line interpretive skills, we stand a decent chance of communicating our design to our drawing-literate friend in manufacturing. But what about our boss’ boss, or purchasing, or sales/marketing? Oh, what are we going to do with our beloved drawings?

If you’ve read my Wayne' World columns or scanned the web site, you probably sense my provocative sentiment on this… Get rid of them! I visit about fifty companies each year and I can assure you that with rare exception the traditional mechanical drawing is an unnecessary, archaic bottleneck in the product development process.

Rather than whittling away at it looking for cases where you can avoid a few drawings, I suggest a bit of zero-base budgeting. Conduct a brief pilot project where you force your team to develop, release, manufacture and inspect a small subassembly with zero drawings. Rely on these great 3D master models.

But you’re thinking, come on WAM-man, enough with the philosophy, give me some specifics.

	Get your manufacturing engineers to do their process planning, tool design, and NC tool path generation directly from your solid models.
	And what about inspection? Put tolerances, datums, and feature control symbols directly on the 3D model. It’ll take a bit longer in 3D, but then you’ve really got a single "master model". You can export this 3D annotated model and inspection report viewable in a web browser. From this target zero-base, resort if you absolutely must to entering the inspection data onto a minimally dimensioned drawing but do not, repeat, do not detail the drawing.
	"But our external suppliers don’t have 3D CAD (or worse yet, only have 2D)." At least for the pilot project, find one that has a compatible 3D CAD system. What you want to uncover here is business benefit (e.g. quicker delivery time) that arises from early supplier involvement with the master model.
	Now we come to the really fun part. Pick two additional pilot team members, one from the sales department and one from executive management. Install a 3D viewer on their PCs. As your pilot progresses, publish your project status with 3D assembly models every day or so to your intranet – and get the sales and management guys to browse and fly-through the data. Encourage the salesperson to show it to a customer.
	But someone complains that even a 19" or 21" monitor is too small to really see the design. Rent or buy a portable projector (by the way, several of the better models are designed with 3D CAD) and display your 3D models wall-sized for interactive design reviews.

So, what’ll we get from this pilot project? I’m betting that you’ll discover there is life without drawings. You’ll verify process improvements based on the new 3D backbone and document specific procedures to be used in future production projects. Perhaps most importantly, you’ll find an acceptance, bordering on eagerness, to leverage the 3D data asset across the breadth of your evermore-virtual corporation. Can you see it? It’s there in the dawn’s early light.

A 35-year veteran of the computer-aided design, engineering and product lifecycle marketplace, Wayne McClelland is well-known as an energetic pioneer in the development and implementation of technologies for structural dynamics, finite element analysis, 3D solid modeling, and workgroup data management. Wayne can be reached at waynemcc@wamware.com or www.wamware.com.